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THE  UNITED  STATES 
OF  AMERICA 

I 

THROUGH  THE  CIVIL  WAR 


BY 


DAVID  SAVILLE  MUZZEY,  PH.D. 

-&- 

BARNARD  COLLEGE,  COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY,  NEW  YORK  CITY 


GINN  AND  COMPANY 

BOSTON     •    NEW   YORK     •    CHICAGO     •    LONDON 
ATLANTA     -     DALLAS     •    COLUMBUS     •     SAN    FRANCISCO 


7f 


COPYRIGHT,  1922,  BY  DAVID  SAVILLE  MUZZEY 

ENTERED   AT   STATIONERS'  HALL 

ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 


tilNN   AND  COMPANY  •  PRO- 
PRIETORS  •  BOSTON  'U.S.A. 


PREFACE 

This  book  is  intended  primarily  for  college  students.  It  aims 
at  something  beyond  that  mere  chronicling  of  the  facts  of  the 
past  in  fuller  detail  which  often  makes  the  "advanced"  history 
text  only  the  elementary  book  "writ  large."  In  other  branches 
of  study  there  is  progression.  The  writer  on  calculus  or  me- 
chanical engineering  does  not  feel  it  incumbent  upon  him  to 
restate  and  explain  simple  mathematical  processes,  like  factor- 
ing or  the  extraction  of  cube  root.  He  takes  the  knowledge  of 
these  things  for  granted.  But  historians  are  often  content  to 
repeat  over  and  over  again  the  same  succession  of  names  and 
dates,  instead  of  attempting  to  interpret  their  meaning  to  ma- 
turing minds.  This  is  what  gives  so  many  students  the  impres- 
sion that  history  is  a  discipline  of  memory  of  past  events,  and 
the  content  of  history  a  museum  of  wax  figures  in  no  vital  rela- 
tion to  the  society  of  today.  Obviously,  unless  the  historian 
can  show  that  the  men  and  institutions  of  the  past  have  that 
inevitable  parental  relation  to  present  social  and  political  struc- 
tures which  the  biologist,  for  example,  traces  in  the  develop- 
ment of  physical  life,  history  will  continue  to  be  remote,  unreal, 
and  unrelated. 

As  a  succession  of  happenings  the  past,  even  the  most  recent 
past,  is  forever  gone.  It  is  as  far  beyond  our  reach  as  the 
moons  of  Jupiter.  It  is  behind  our  back,  too.  The  entire  and 
increasing  work  of  our  life  is  the  unceasing  creation  of  a  future 
with  our  present  materials — as  in  the  case  of  the  traveler  who 
lays  the  corduroy  road  ahead  of  him  log  by  log.  Because  our 
present  material  is  the  heritage  of  the  long  past,  that  past  has 
eternal  significance  in  determining  the  direction  of  the  road 
which  we  lay. 

Such  is  the  spirit  in  which  this  book  has  been  written.  Its 
subject  is  the  development  of  the  American  ideal  of  democracy, 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF 
AMERICA 

CHAPTER  I 
THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND 

/  shall  yet  live  to  see  it  an  Inglishe  Nation. — SIR  WALTER  RALEIGH 

THE  SETTLEMENTS 

In  the  fourscore  and  six  years  that  elapsed  between  the  cere- 
monious advent  of  the  first  James  Stuart  to  the  English  throne 
and  the  unceremonious  departure  therefrom  of  his  grandson, 
the  second  James  Stuart,  a  number  of  English  settlements 
were  planted  on  the  Atlantic  coast  of  North  America  from  the 
Penobscot  River  in  Maine  to  the  Ashley  and  Cooper  Rivers 
in  South  Carolina.  Only  along  the  New  England  shore  was 
the  border  of  settlements  continuous,  comprising  near  the 
close  of  the  seventeenth  century  some  75,000  inhabitants,  a 
third  of  the  population  of  the  colonies.  Below  the  harbor  of 
New  York  the  coast  was  still  a  wilderness  of  forest,  dune,  and 
swamp,  except  for  a  few  scattered  families  where  Delaware  and 
Chesapeake  Bays  joined  the  ocean,  an  ill-nourished  colony  of 
Virginian  malcontents  who  had  drifted  down  the  shore  of  Albe- 
marle  Sound  to  the  mouth  of  the  Roanoke,  and  a  group  of  late- 
comers three  hundred  miles  further  to  the  south  around  the 
pleasant  waters  of  Charleston's  rivers  and  bay.  New  York, 
New  Jersey,  Pennsylvania,  Delaware,  Maryland,  Virginia,  and 
the  Carolinas,  so  far  as  these  names  represented  actual  com- 
munities of  settlers  and  not  vast  and  indeterminate  tracts  of 
Indian  wilderness  granted  by  the  Stuarts,  consisted  of  less  than 
150,000  people  living  at  forts  and  trading-posts,  on  plantations, 


2  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

or  in  flourishing  commercial  towns  along  the  easily  navigable 
Hudson  and  the  lower  courses  of  the  rivers  emptying  into  the 
two  great  bays  of  the  middle  Atlantic  coast. 

The  overwhelming  majority  of  the  settlers,  practically  all  in 
the  colonies  founded  before  the  Stuart  Restoration  of  1660 
(Virginia,  New  England,  Maryland),  were  Englishmen.  Still, 
the  process  had  already  begun  which  was  to  make  America  the 
melting-pot  of  the  nations.  Almost  at  the  same  moment  that  he 
granted  the  Virginia  charters  James  I  started  the  Plantation  of 
Ulster  in  northern  Ireland  (1611),  a  scheme  for  replacing  the 
Roman  Catholic  natives  by  Protestant  tenants  under  the  pro- 
prietorship of  absentee  nobles  and  London  merchants.  The 
tenants  were  recruited  chiefly  from  the  Presbyterians  of  the 
Lowlands  of  Scotland,  whose  industry  and  thrift  built  a  colony 
of  a  million  or  more  inhabitants  in  Ulster  before  the  close  of  the 
seventeenth  century.  But  their  prosperity  and  their  Presby- 
terianism  alike  became  an  offense  in  the  eyes  of  the  Stuarts. 
They  were  persecuted  for  their  nonconformity  to  the  Anglican 
Church,  and  their  exports  of  cattle,  wool,  and  linen  were  sub- 
jected to  heavy  duties  to  protect  English  merchants  and  manu- 
facturers. Suffering  under  these  burdens,  the  Scotch-Irish 
began  to  emigrate  to  the  new  land  of  promise.  At  first  only 
a  few  hundred  came  to  Pennsylvania,  Maryland,  and  the 
Carolinas;  but  with  the  eighteenth  century  the  migration 
quickened,  and  the  Scotch-Irish  poured  into  the  valleys  of  the 
Appalachian  range  from  Pennsylvania  to  Georgia,  forming  the 
sturdy  advance  guard  of  the  American  pioneers — our  first 
frontiersmen.  No  other  non-English  stock  furnished  so  large 
a  quota  to  our  colonial  immigration  or  exercised  so  powerful 
an  influence  on  the  development  of  our  national  life  as  these 
exiled  exiles  from  the  northern  counties  of  Ireland.  Their  sons 
founded  our  first  states  west  of  the  Alleghenies.  The  roll  call 
of  their  descendants  includes  the  names  of  Stark,  Knox, 
McClellan,  McKinley,  Greeley,  Motley,  Rutledge,  Jackson, 
and  Calhoun. 

From  the  continent  of  Europe  also  came  settlers  to  enrich 
and  diversify  American  life.  Dutchmen  and  Swedes  were 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  3 

established  on  the  banks  of  the  Hudson  and  the  Delaware 
several  decades  before  those  streams  became  the  North  River 
and  the  South  River  respectively  of  the  Duke  of  York's 
province  (1664).  The  religious  wars  and  persecutions  of  the 
sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries  in  Germany,  France,  and 
the 'Netherlands  led  to  considerable  displacement  of  population 
and  resulted  in  voluntary  or  enforced  migrations  whose  waves 
reached  even  the  shores  of  the  New  World.  From  Germany, 
Bohemia,  and  Hungary  came  Anabaptists,  the  radicals  of  the 
Protestant  Reformation,  who  carried  religious  dissent  to  its 
logical  conclusion  in  pure  individualism,  rebelling  against  the 
authority  of  a  Protestant  magistrate  no  less  than  against  that 
of  a  Catholic  bishop,  rejecting  all  forms  and  ceremonies  in 
worship,  and  insisting  on  personal  holiness  of  life — pledged 
in  adult  baptism — as  the  irremissible  condition  of  member- 
ship in  the  church  of  Christ.  From  the  Rhenish  Palatinate 
came  Calvinists,  driven  from  their  homes  by  the  merciless 
devastations  of  that  fairest  of  the  provinces  of  Germany  by  the 
generals  of  Louis  XIV,  the  inexorable  Turenne  and  the  brutal 
Louvois  (1674,  1689).  From  France  came  Huguenots,  mem- 
bers of  the  valuable  industrial  groups  of  ironworkers,  paper- 
makers,  tanners,  and  silk-weavers  whom  Louis  XIV's  dragoons 
hunted  out  of  the  cities  in  the  enforcement  of  the  culminat- 
ing folly  of  his  reign,  the  revocation  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes 
(1685).  These,  with  a  few  Welshmen,  Jews,  Finns,  and  Poles, 
infused  a  strain  of  foreign  blood  into  all  the  colonies,  though 
they  were  most  numerous  in  Pennsylvania,  the  Jerseys,  and 
the  Carolinas,  where  the  proprietors  were  anxious  to  secure 
settlers.  William  Penn  even  advertised  his  colony  widely  on  the 
continent  by  translations  into  Dutch  and  German  of  a  prospec- 
tus entitled  "Some  Account  of  the  Province  of  Pennsylvania 
— made  Publick  for  the  information  of  such  as  are  or  may  be 
disposed  to  transport  Themselves  or  Servants  into  those  Parts" 
(1681).  He  had  his  returns  in  the  sale  of  15,000  acres  of  land 
to  a  group  of  Frankfort  Pietists,  and  the  foundation  two  years 
later  by  German  mechanics  and  weavers  of  the  new  "city  of 
Germantown  or  Germanopolis." 


d  on  map  In  Channing's 
History  of  the  United  Sta 


COLONIAL  GRANTS  AND  ACTUAL  SETTLEMENTS  IN  THE  SEVENTEENTH 

CENTURY 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  5 

Naturally  these  Scotch-Irish,  German,  and  French  settlers, 
seeking  an  asylum  from  religious  and  political  persecution  in 
the  Old  World,  would  furnish  little  encouragement  in  the  New 
World  to  schemes  for  the  imposition  of  an  autocratic  govern- 
ment or  an  orthodox  faith  upon  the  colonists.  Their  contribu- 
tion to  liberty  and  democracy  in  America  was  consistent  and 
constant.  They  were  readily  assimilated  to  the  English  settlers, 
because  an  essential  identity  of  interest  brought  them  here. 
America  was  for  them,  as  it  has  been  for  the  millions  of  immi- 
grants who  have  followed  them,  the  land  of  opportunity  in 
industry,  of  immunity  from  persecution,  of  community  of 
political  life. 

Foreign  immigrants,  however,  formed  but  a  small  fraction  of 
the  colonial  life  of  America.  It  was  English  institutions — not 
German,  French,  or  Dutch — that  were  permanently  trans- 
planted to  the  New  World :  English  language,  law,  administra- 
tion, letters,  customs,  and  liberties.  To  the  mother  country, 
then,  which  sent  out  its  tens  of  thousands  to  the  new  land,  we 
must  look  for  the  motives  and  conditions  that  determined  the 
early  American  settlements.  To  analyze  these  motives  and 
conditions  fully  would  be  to  write  the  history  of  England  in  the 
sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries.  It  was  a  part  of  England 
that  came  to  America,  a  part  determined  both  by  England's 
relations  to  the  continent  of  Europe  and  by  the  interplay  of 
classes,  parties,  and  sects  within  England  itself.  Let  us  pass 
in  review  some  of  the  more  conspicuous  of  the  motives  and 
circumstances  of  colonial  migration:  commercial  rivalry  with 
Spain,  industrial  conditions  in  England,  opposition  to  the  polit- 
ical system  of  the  Stuarts,  and  the  desire  for  liberty  of  belief 
and  worship. 

One  of  the  most  significant  features  of  that  slow  change  from 
the  medieval  and  feudal  Europe  of  the  fourteenth  century  to 
the  modern  and  nationalistic  Europe  of  the  sixteenth  century 
which  is  generally  miscalled  a  "renaissance"  was  the  shift- 
ing of  the  routes  of  trade  from  the  Mediterranean  and  the  in- 
land cities  of  Europe  to  the  Atlantic  littoral.  Venice,  Genoa, 
Amain,  Augsburg,  Cologne,  Marseilles,  Lyons,  and  Ghent  were 


6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

succeeded  as  marts  of  trade  by  Cadiz,  Lisbon,  Dieppe,  London, 
Bristol,  and  Antwerp.  The  third  stage  of  water-borne  com- 
merce was  at  hand.  As  the  age  of  classical  antiquity  was 
ushered  in  'by  the  substitution  of  landlocked  sea  commerce  for 
the  old  river  commerce  of  the  Nile,  the  Tigris,  and  the  Eu- 
phrates, so  the  modern  age  dawned  with  the  widening  of  com- 
merce to  the  great  oceans.  The  three  navigable  oceans  of  the 
world  were  all  crossed  for  the  first  time  by  European  explorers 
in  the  single  generation  between  1492  and  1522. 

The  happy  position  of  Spain  and  Portugal  at  the  junction  of 
the  Mediterranean  Sea  and  the  Atlantic  Ocean,  and  their 
proximity  to  the  coast  of  Africa,  along  which  the  earliest  lines 
of  oceanic  traffic  ran,  gave  to  the  countries  of  the  Iberian 
peninsula  an  early  start  in  the  new  field  of  distant  discovery 
and  exploration.  That  they  were  not  slow  to  seize  that  advan- 
tage is  shown  by  their  arbitrary  division  of  the  whole  unex- 
plored world  between  them  at  the  close  of  the  fifteenth  century. 
The  next  century,  however,  saw  the  rapid  rise  of  England  and 
Holland  as  commercial  powers  in  sharp  rivalry  with  Spain  and 
Portugal.  The  Elizabethan  seamen  who  chased  Spanish  treas- 
ure ships  among  the  islands  of  the  West  Indies  and  even  into 
the  very  harbors  of  Spain  were  doubtless  obeying  the  impulse 
of  the  buccaneer,  but  they  were  none  the  less  laying  the  founda- 
tions of  England's  colonial  empire.  The  earliest  settlers  who 
came  to  Jamestown  and  scores  of  the  New  England  immigrants 
of  the  following  decades  had  shared  in  the  jubilation  over  the 
defeat  of  the  Spanish  Armada,  which  "ennobled  many  coasts 
with  the  wrecks  of  noble  ships"  (1588).  They  remembered 
from  their  boyhood  days  how  gorgeous  Queen  Elizabeth  had 
knighted  Francis  Drake  on  the  quarter-deck  of  his  brave  ship, 
the  Golden  Hind,  just  returned  from  a  voyage  round  the  world, 
laden  with  the  priceless  treasures  of  plundered  Spanish  galleons 
(1580) ;  or  even  recalled  the  storm  of  mingled  dismay  and  in- 
dignation which  swept  over  England  when  the  Pope  at  the 
solicitation  of  the  Spanish  court  launched  his  bull  of  deposition 
against  their  queen  ( 1 570) .  The  Elizabethan  seamen  had  the  rare 
opportunity  of  serving  both  God  and  mammon  by  despoiling 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  7 

what  they  called  "the  papistical  Spaniard."  The  Virginia 
settlement  of  1607  was  not  only  a  commercial  venture  but  a 
blow  at  Spain's  power,  as  was  amply  proved  by  the  behavior 
of  the  latter  country.  On  more  than  one  occasion  she  sent  ships 
into  the  James  River,  hoping  to  break  up  the  settlement. 
A  Spanish  captain  seized  the  John  and  Mary  on  her  way  to 
Virginia  in  1620,  loaded  with  colonists  and  supplies.  And  the 
Spanish  ambassador  in  London  was  busy  in  season  and  out  of 
season  sowing  discord  among  the  members  of  the  Virginia  Com- 
pany and  poisoning  the  mind  of  King  James  against  them  with 
hints  of  "seditious"  practices. 

Less  romantic,  but  no  less  compelling,  were  the  economic 
motives  which  led  to  the  English  migrations  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  The  national  states  which  rose  on  the  ruins  of  feu- 
dalism needed  money  above  everything  else.  Political  adminis- 
tration, commercial  regulation,  military  defense,  broadened  out 
from  municipal  and  local  limits  to  a  national  scale ;  and  with 
the  process  grew  the  need  for  a  large  civil  service,  for  judicial 
and  financial  departments  of  state,  for  armies  and  fleets.  The 
national  treasuries  were  taxed  to  the  utmost.  Credit  and  fund- 
ing systems  were  not  yet  in  operation,  the  banks  of  Amsterdam 
and  London  not  yet  in  existence.  Actual  money — gold  and 
silver — was  indispensable  for  running  the  state.  Great  quan- 
tities of  the  precious  metals  were  taken  from  the  mines  of 
America  by  the  Spaniards,  and  England  diverted  as  much  as 
possible  of  this  treasure  to  her  own  coffers,  either  by  the  direct 
method  of  seizing  the  Spanish  ships  or  by  the  indirect  method 
of  multiplying  the  output  of  her  industries  for  the  Spanish 
market. 

The  increase  of  gold  and  silver  in  the  realm  brought  with  it 
a  rise  in  prices  and  rents  which  bore  hard  on  the  workingman 
and  the  farmer.  Severe  statutes  held  the  laborer  to  work  at 
wages  fixed  by  the  justices  of  the  peace,  under  penalty  of  im- 
prisonment or  forced  service  if  he  refused.  The  harsh  poor- 
laws  and  vagrancy  laws  of  Elizabeth's  reign  show  that  the 
land  was  filled  with  "valiant  rogues  and  sturdy  beggars."  As 
the  farms  were  turned  into  sheep  pastures,  under  the  double 


8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

impetus  of  mounting  rents  and  a  widening  wool  market,  the 
peasant  class  had  to  bear  the  poverty  and  distress  that  always 
accompanies  an  economic  readjustment.  The  hands  that  had 
guided  the  plow  were  often  idle  a  long  time  before  they  learned 
to  operate  the  loom.  Besides,  with  the  closing  of  the  monas- 
teries, and  the  appropriation  of  their  lands  to  endow  the  new 
nobility  of  Henry  VIII,  the  mildest  landlords  in  the  kingdom 
had  been  dispossessed,  and  the  chief  comfort,  charity,  and 
asylum  for  the  poor  had  been  withdrawn. 

When  historians  speak  of  the  "overpopulation"  of  England 
in  the  seventeenth  century  as  one  of  the  causes  of  the  colonizing 
movement,  it  is  this  economic  condition  that  they  really  mean. 
It  seems  ridiculous  to  call  the  England  of  James  I  overpopu- 
lated,  when  the  whole  realm  contained  little  more  than  half  the 
number  of  inhabitants  that  the  city  of  London  does  today.  The 
distress  arose  not  from  England's  crowding  but  from  a  radical 
disturbance  in  the  scale  of  values.  Luxury  and  extravagance, 
of  which  we  begin  to  hear  much  in  the  "spacious  days  of  great 
Elizabeth,"  brought  their  inevitable  complement  of  poverty  and 
squalor.  "This  land  grows  weary  of  her  inhabitants,  soe  as  man 
is  heer  of  less  price  among  us  than  a  horse  or  a  sheep,"  wrote 
John  Winthrop,  the  leader  of  the  Puritan  migration  to  Massa- 
chusetts in  1630;  and  he  continues,  "We  stand  here  striving 
for  space  of  habitation  .  .  .  and  in  ye  mean  tyme  suffer  a 
whole  continent  as  fruitful  and  convenient  for  the  use  of  man 
to  waste  without  any  improvement."  Shall  we  wonder 'that 
hundreds  of  able-bodied  men  preferred  the  hold  of  the  emigrant 
ship,  with  freedom  and  opportunity  at  the  end  of  the  voyage, 
to  a  foul  cell  in  a  debtor's  prison  with  renewed  misery  on 
their  release ! 

When  the  prospectus  of  a  colonizing  company  or  the  induce- 
ments of  the  shippers'  agents  failed  to  secure  enough  emigrants 
to  people  the  colony,  the  government  came  to  the  aid  of  the 
proprietors  by  granting  them  permission  to  seize  vagabonds, 
paupers,  and  criminals  to  take  out  to  the  plantations.  King 
James  I  wrote  a  letter  to  the  treasurer  and  council  of  the  Vir- 
ginia Company  in  1619,  commanding  them  to  send  to  Virginia 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  9 

a  hundred  "dissolute  persons  which  the  knight-marshall  should 
deliver  to  them."  A  commission  was  appointed  in  1633  to  res- 
cue from  the  clutches  of  the  jailer  persons  convicted  of  certain 
crimes  and  to  "bestow  them  to  be  used  in  the  discoveries  and 
other  foreign  employment."  Soon  after  the  restoration  of 
Charles  II  (1660)  transportation  to  the  colonies  was  made  the 
legal  penalty  for  some  crimes.  Even  as  late  as  1722  we  find  the 
Virginia  legislature  vainly  striving  to  stop  the  importation  of 
criminals.  But  the  deleterious  effect  on  the  colonies  of  this 
migration  of  the  "scum  of  England"  has  been  much  exagger- 
ated. Comparatively  few  jailbirds  and  paupers  came,  and  of 
those  few  the  greater  part  were  made  over  into  diligent  and  self- 
respecting  farmers  and  laborers  by  their  strenuous  life  in  the 
New  World.1 

The  urge  of  adventure,  commercial  rivalry,  and  economic 
pressure  were  general  stimulants  to  colonial  migration,  but  the 
steady  trend  of  the  Stuart  government  toward  political  abso- 
lutism and  religious  coercion  gave  that  migration  its  peculiar 
character  of  self-reliance.  The  Stuart  absolutism  was  the  at- 
tempt to  extend  a  medieval  system  of  government  into  an  age 
which  was  rapidly  becoming  modern,  an  age  in  which  there  was 
emerging  a  bourgeois,  or  middle,  class,  enriched  by  manufac- 
ture, farming,  and  trade,  which  broke  up  the  old  social  frame- 
work of  noble,  priest,  and  peasant.  History  from  the  days  of 
Solon  to  the  days  of  Disraeli  has  demonstrated  the  truth  that  a 
share  in  political  power  cannot  be  permanently  denied  to  a  class 
that  has  acquired  wealth.  But  the  Stuart  kings  had  little  re- 
gard for  the  lessons  of  history.  They  proclaimed  themselves 
"God's  lieutenants  on  earth"  and  declared  their  prerogative 
"a  mystery  of  state"  and  "a  transcendant  matter."  They  held 
themselves  in  no  wise  responsible  to  the  people  of  England  for 
the  exercise  of  their  powers.  The  Parliament  they  regarded  as 

*A  peculiar  form  of  colonial  immigrant  was  the  "indentured  servant,"  or 
"  redemptioner,"  who,  in  order  to  pay  for  his  passage  to  America,  sold  his  serv- 
ices for  a  term  of  years  (often  seven)  and  so  became  a  sort  of  temporary  slave. 
Professor  John  R.  Commons  reckons  that  half  the  English  who  came  to  the  col- 
onies were  redemptioners. 


10  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  group  of  committees,  only  meeting  when  the  sovereign  gra- 
ciously deigned  to  summon  them,  and  dispersing  at  his  order. 
The  sovereign  undoubtedly  had  the  weight  of  tradition  on  his 
side,  for  the  crown  was  the  power  around  which  the  institutions 
of  England  had  grown.  It  antedated  the  House  of  Commons  by 
centuries.  But  already  before  the  death  of  Queen  Elizabeth 
the  Commons  were  growing  restive  under  strict  royal  patronage 
and  tutelage.  They  dared  to  speak  their  minds  openly,  while 
the  queen  scolded  them  with  tears  of  rage  in  her  eyes,  "Ye 
durst  not  have  treated  my  royal  father  so ! "  With  chivalrous 
memory  of  the  great  things  their  queen  had  done  for  England, 
the  Commons  forebore  to  press  the  quarrel. 

But  when  the  half-foreign  dynasty  of  the  Stuarts  came  to  the 
throne  the  quarrel  broke  out.  Danger  from  the  Spaniard  was 
past.  Commercial  wealth  was  multiplying  wonderfully  in  the 
land.  The  extravagance  of  the  court  made  increasing  demands 
on  the  national  purse.  The  Commons,  recruited  more  and  more 
from  the  representatives  of  the  new  prosperity,  resented  the 
thinly  veiled  tone  of  contempt  in  which  the  king  addressed  them, 
criticized  him  for  his  subserviency  to  a  worthless  set  of  courtiers, 
and  made  their  grants  of  money  contingent  on  the  guarantee  of 
privileges  which  they  claimed  were  as  old  as  Magna  Carta. 
After  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  wrangling  over  taxes  and  privi- 
leges, during  which  seven  Parliaments  were  called  in  desperation 
and  dismissed  in  anger,  the  king  decided  to  do  without  a  Parlia- 
ment altogether.  For  eleven  years  ( 1 629-1 640)  Charles  I  ruled 
England  with  the  advice  and  support  of  his  courtiers  alone, 
squeezing  the  necessary  revenues  from  a  reluctant  people  by 
every  device  discoverable  by  ingenious  lawyers  and  servile  offi- 
cials, improvising  fines  for  new  offenses,  reviving  feudal  dues 
long  obsolete,  and  even  confiscating  the  private  property  of  his 
subjects  under  the  fiction  of  a  loan  to  the  state. 

It  was  exactly  during  the  years  from  the  opening  of  James  I's 
quarrel  with  Parliament  to  the  close  of  Charles  I's  experi- 
ment in  personal  government  (1604-1640)  that  the  foundations 
of  the  American  nation  were  laid.  In  those  years  the  two  colo- 
nies of  Virginia  and  Massachusetts,  which  in  a  large  measure 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  II 

established  political  and  social  precedents  for  all  the  later  settle- 
ments, were  planted  and  took  on  a  character  which  was  to  dis- 
tinguish them  down  to  the  American  Revolution.  By  1640  these 
colonies  had  each  received  about  15,000  emigrants  from  the 
homeland, — not  landed  nobles,  royal  judges,  courtiers,  and  offi- 
cials, who  were  the  natural  champions  of  the  Stuart  prerogative, 
but  men  of  the  middle  class,  enterprising,  inquiring,  innovating 
people,  to  whom  the  spectacle  of  a  rich  and  developing  state 
serving  the  whim  of  an  irresponsible  monarch  seemed  an  anach- 
ronism. They  were  the  political  misfits  of  England. 

They  were  religious  misfits  also.  Puritanism  and  "  independ- 
ency," religious  and  political  dissent,  went  hand  in  hand.  It 
was  impossible  that  the  children  of  the  Reformation  should  re- 
ject the  authority  of  Pope  and  prelate  without  questioning  that 
of  king  and  lord.  Protestants  who  had  fled  from  England  during 
the  persecutions  of  Mary  the  Catholic,  in  the  middle  of  the  six- 
teenth century,  returned  from  Frankfort,  Basel,  Strassburg,  and 
Geneva  under  Elizabeth's  milder  rule,  imbued  with  the  indi- 
vidualism of  Calvin's  theology.  The  habit  of  dissent  from  es- 
tablished forms  of  religion  grew,  in  spite  of  acts  of  uniformity 
and  threats  of  persecution.  Under  Elizabeth  the  Puritan  lay- 
men and  lesser  ministers  were  not  seriously  disturbed,  but  when 
James  Stuart  began  his  reign  by  rejecting  their  petition  for 
freedom  of  worship  and  declaring  that  he  would  make  them  con- 
form to  the  Anglican  Church  "or  harry  them  out  of  the  land," 
the  emigration  began.1  It  became  an  exodus  during  the  decade 
of  the  personal  government  of  Charles  I,  when  Archbishop  Laud 
of  Canterbury,  with  relentless  diligence,  exacted  conformity  in 
faith  and  ritual,  conceiving  the  Church,  as  Gardiner  says,  "not 
as  the  temple  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  but  as  the  palace  of  an  invisible' 
king."  Twenty  thousand  Puritans  came  to  New  England  in  the 
"great  migration"  of  those  years,  while  Roman  Catholics  sought 

aEven  Virginia,  which  was  founded  as  a  commercial  venture,  and  which  is  gen- 
erally contrasted  with  the  New  England  settlements  for  conscience'  sake,  narrowly 
missed  being  a  refuge  for  Puritans.  Only  a  year  after  its  foundation  a  number 
of  Puritans  preparing  to  migrate  thither  were,  through  Archbishop  Bancroft's 
influence,  forbidden  by  King  James  to  leave  the  realm  without  his  permission. 


12  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

refuge  in  Lord  Baltimore's  new  colony.  We  have  already 
seen  how  the  religious  persecutions  on  the  Continent  in  the 
seventeenth  century  sent  French  Huguenots,  German  Pietists, 
and  Moravian  brethren  from  the  devastated  Palatinate  of  the 
Rhine. to  add  their  strain  of  nonconforming  blood  to  the  popu- 
lation of  the  proprietary  colonies  of  New  York,  New  Jersey, 
Pennsylvania,  and  the  Carolinas. 

It  is  impossible,  of  course,  to  say  in  exactly  what  proportion 
the  motives  of  commercial  adventure,  economic  pressure,  polit- 
ical protest,  and  religious  dissent  were  mixed  in  the  emigrants 
of  the  seventeenth  century.  The  same  John  Winthrop  who 
thought  it  a  shame  "to  suffer  a  whole  continent  to  lie  waste  with- 
out any  improvement,"  and  was  himself  "soe  shortened"  in  his 
estate  as  not  to  be  able  "to  keep  sail  with  his  equals,"  and  who 
saw  in  the  arbitrary  sway  of  Charles  I  a  sign  that  God 
would  "bring  some  heavye  Affliction  upon  this  land  and  that 
speedy  lye,"  asserted  that  the  chief  reason  for  going  to  New 
England  was  to  carry  the  gospel  into  America  and  "erect  a  bul- 
wark against  the  kingdom  of  Anti-Christ."  It  is  evident,  how- 
ever, that  any  of  these  motives  singly  or  all  together  would 
produce  a  society  in  which  courage,  endurance,  self-reliance, 
equality  of  opportunity,  and  jealousy  of  privilege  would  be 
conspicuous  traits ;  and  these  traits,  inherent  in  the  very  nature 
of  the  emigrants  from  the  Old  World,  would  only  be  brought 
into  clearer  relief  by  transplantation  to  the  new  home,  where 
life  was  arduous,  dangerous,  unvaried,  and  singularly  exposed 
to  the  inquisitorial  judgment  of  one's  neighbor. 

Much  has  been  written  about  the  social  and  political  contrasts 
between  the  colonial  groups:  the  Puritan  self-governing  com- 
•munities  of  New  England,  with  the  town  as  the  unit  of  political 
organization,  with  Church  and  school  the  outstanding  social 
institutions,  and  petty  farming  and  extensive  commerce  the  chief 
industrial  pursuits ;  the  Cavalier  population  of  the  South,  with 
its  broad  tobacco  plantations,  its  Episcopalian  aristocracy,  and 
its  constant  social  commerce  with  England ;  the  middle  group 
of  colonies,  cosmopolitan  in  blood,  varied  in  religion,  contentious 
in  government,  and  keen  for  trade.  These  contrasts  doubtless 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  13 

existed  and  played  an  important  part  in  the  development  of 
the  colonies.  But  far  more  important  than  the  contrasts  were  the 
similar  tendencies  and  common  conditions  of  colonial  life.  The 
distance  of  the  settlements  from  England,  their  virtual  inde- 
pendence of  continuous  control  by  the  home  government,  the 
need  of  finding  their  own  resources  for  the  development  of  the 
new  land  and  often  for  defense  against  the  Indians, — all  served 
to  intensify  in  the  whole  body  of  colonists  the  radical  traits  of 
the  original  settlers.1  Radicalism  in  England  was  a  mere  epi- 
sode in  the  turbulent  history  of  the  seventeenth  century;  in 
America  it  rapidly  became  a  tradition.  Even  Oliver  Crom- 
well condemned  the  " leveling  politics"  and  religious  anarchy 
of  Rhode  Island. 

The  things  in  which  the  colonists  agreed,  then,  were  far  more 
significant  than  the  things  in  which  they  differed.  They  spoke 
the  same  language,  they  preserved  and  adapted  to  their  own 
use  the  same  common  law,2  they  brought  the  same  traditions  of 
political  evolution — Magna  Carta,  the  control  of  the  purse, 
Habeas  Corpus,  and  the  criticism  of  royal  ministers.  It  was  not 
alone  in  Massachusetts,  whose  entire  colonial  history  was  an 
apprenticeship  in  the  art  of  independence,  that  the  birthright  of 
Englishmen  was  cherished.  Virginia  began  soon  after  its  foun- 
dation to  concern  itself  with  the  preservation  of  its  freedom. 
The  last  House  of  Burgesses  that  met  before  the  surrender  of 
the  charter  to  the  king  (1624)  decreed  that  no  tax  should  be 
laid  on  the  colony  without  its  consent,  nor  money  spent  without 

1The  English  government  never  made  the  colonies  a  paternal  concern,  as  did 
the  European  states.  The  king  granted  rights,  but  left  to  the  corporations  and 
proprietors  the  expense  of  exploration  and  settlement.  There  were  no  English 
fleets,  like  the  Portuguese,  Dutch,  and  Spanish,  to  convey  colonial  commerce ; 
and  even  the  English  officials  appointed  by  the  crown  to  the  colonies  depended 
for  their  salaries,  with  few  exceptions,  on  freely  elected  assemblies. 

2  Not  only  during  the  colonial  period  but  even  far  down  into  our  national 
history  it  was  recognized  that  the  English  common  law  was  in  force  in  America. 
"Let  an  Englishman  go  where  he  will,"  said  an  English  authority  in  1720,  "he 
carries  as  much  of  law  and  liberty  with  him  as  the  nature  of  things  will  bear." 
And  in  1815  Justice  Story,  of  the  United  States  Supreme  Court,  wrote,  "We 
take  it  to  be  a  clear  principle  that  the  common  law  in  force  at  the  emigration 
of  our  ancestors  is  deemed  the  birthright  of  the  colonies." 


14  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

its  authorization.  A  few  years  later  (1635)  the  Virginians 
deposed  the  king's  governor,  John  Harvey,  and  sent  him  back  to 
England, — an  act  called  by  Charles  II  "an  assumption  of  royal 
power."  A  few  years  later  still  (1652),  when  Oliver  Cromwell 
had  sent  over  a  warship  to  demand  the  surrender  of  the  province 
to  Parliament,  the  Burgesses  drew  up  a  "treaty"  with  him  in 
which  they  declared  that  their  submission  was  "voluntary,"  and 
demanded  a  guarantee  of  free  speech,  free  trade,  and  exemption 
from  all  taxes  not  granted  by  their  own  body.  If  the  Virginians 
of  the  Restoration  and  the  Hanoverian  period  were  attached  to 
their  king,  their  aristocracy,  and  their  church,  that  attachment 
never  meant  servility.  When  it  came  to  the  choice  between  their 
interests  and  their  attachment  they  were  ready  to  sacrifice  the 
latter.  The  early  history  of  the  relations  of  the  proprietors  to 
their  settlers  in  Maryland,  Pennsylvania,  New  Jersey,  and  the 
Carolinas  furnishes  many  examples  of  the  same  spirit  of  jeal- 
ousy of  executive  encroachments.  "Among  other  detestable 
ills,"  wrote  George  Chalmers  of  London,  in  1780,  "the  American 
climate  seems  always  to  have  begotten  a  propensity  to  dis- 
obedience." Edmund  Burke  had  said  five  years  before  in 
Parliament  that  the  Americans  were  animated  by  a  "fierce  spirit 
of  liberty." 

The  economic  and  social  life  of  the  colonists  was  that  of  a 
frontier  community.  They  were  a  sparse  population  in  a  wide 
land  and  a  poor  population  on  a  virgin  land.  The  forest  and  the 
Indian,  the  rocky  soil  of  the  New  England  coast,  and  the 
swamps  and  jungles  of  the  South  were  the  obstacles  against 
which  they  had  to  contend.  The  early  years  in  most  of  the 
colonies  were  a  time  of  great  hardship  and  privation,  establish- 
ing the  tradition  that  it  was  a  sifted  people,  "picked  out.  by  a 
strange  contrivance  of  God,"  who  were  the  founders  of  the 
American  nation.  There  were  no  manufactures  to  gather  the 
people  into  cities,  for  land  was  abundant  and  cheap,  while  labor 
was  scarce  and  dear.  Boston,  the  largest  town  of  the  seven- 
teenth century,  was  a  fishing-port  and  a  mart  of  trade  with  the 
West  Indies  and  the  Old  World.  In  New  England  generally  the 
people  were  gathered  in  little  communities  seldom  reaching  a 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  15 

thousand  souls.  The  land  was  divided  among  the  farmers  in 
small  holdings,  and  community  life,  as  it  centered  in  the  town 
meeting  and  the  church,  was  intensely  vigorous  and  critical. 
In  Virginia  the  early  devotion  of  the  colony  to  the  growing  of 
tobacco,  in  spite  of  the  efforts  of  the  king  and  the  company  to 
foster  a  more  wholesome  and  varied  production,  led  to  the 
occupation  of  large  tracts  of  land  by  the  planters  and  made  im- 
possible the  establishment  of  the  town,  with  its  local  democratic 
features  of  meetinghouse  and  public  school.  On  "court  days" 
the  squires  would  ride  from  miles  around  to  the  county  seat  and 
make  a  holiday  with  races,  games,  and  flights  of  electioneering 
oratory.  But  a  continuous  round  of  meetings  and  classes  was 
impossible  in  a  region  where  one's  neighbor's  house  was  visible 
only  through  a  field  glass.  The  Virginia  holdings  averaged  450 
acres  in  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century  and  over  900 
acres  at  the  end  of  it,  while  patents  of  20,000,  30,000,  or  even 
40,000  acres  were  not  unknown.  At  the  close  of  the  Stuart 
period  a  few  thousand  planters  in  Virginia  had  title  to  lands 
equal  in  area  to  the  whole  of  England.  These  estates  descended 
from  father  to  eldest  son  by  right  of  primogeniture  until  the  time 
of  the  American  Revolution,  and  naturally  engendered  an  aris- 
tocracy of  untitled  squires.  The  middle  colonies,  except  for  the 
great  patroonships  along  the  Hudson,  corresponded  more  closely 
in  economic  structure  to  New  England  than  to  the  Southern 
colonies.  There  was  little  tobacco  culture ;  the  soil  was  glaci- 
ated ;  farming  was  the  common  occupation  of  the  mixed  popu- 
lation, while  the  Hudson  opened  an  artery  for  the  valuable  fur 
trade.  The  beaver  became  the  emblem  of  New  York,  as  the 
"sacred  codfish"  did  of  Boston. 

The  Puritan  settlers  of  New  England  were  keen  for  popular 
education.  Harvard  College  was  established  six  years  after 
Winthrop's  company  landed,  and  a  law  of  the  Bay  Colony, 
passed  in  1649,  provided  that  every  town  of  fifty  householders 
must  furnish  a  teacher  of  reading  and  writing,  and  every  town 
of  one  hundred  families  a  grammar  school  preparing  for  the 
college,  "to  the  end  that  Learning  may  not  be  buried  in  the 
graves  of  our  fore  Fathers  in  Church  and  Commonwealth, 


1 6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  Lord  assisting  our  Endeavors."  But  "learning"  for  the  New 
England  Puritan  was  synonymous  with  theology.  Intense  as  his 
intellectual  life  was,  it  was  not  so  broad  as  that  of  the  educated 
man  of  the  Southern  provinces.  The  explosive  remark  of  an 
irritable  old  governor  of  Virginia,  "I  thank  God  there  are  no 
free  schools  nor  printing,  and  I  hope  we  shall  not  have  them  in 
a  hundred  years,"  has  been  quoted  again  and  again  to  prove  that 
the  Old  Dominion  was  illiterate.  But  in  spite  of  Governor 
Berkeley's  deplorable  piety  of  ignorance,  William  and  Mary 
College  was  established  in  1693,  from  whose  halls  have  come 
four  of  the  presidents  of  the  United  States.  Addison,  Pope,  Con- 
greve,  Steele,  Beaumont,  and  Shakespeare  graced  the  shelves  of 
private  libraries,  which,  like  Colonel  Byrd's  of  Westover,  some- 
times ran  into  the  thousands  of  volumes.  Our  French  visitor 
the  Duke  of  Rochefoucauld  in  1795  thought  that  "a  taste  for 
reading  was  more  prevalent  among  the  gentlemen  of  the  first 
class  in  Virginia  than  in  any  other  part  of  America."  The 
Apollo  Room  of  the  Raleigh  Tavern  at  Williamsburg,  where 
many  of  the  early  acts  of  the  Revolution  were  planned,  may 
share  with  Faneuil  Hall  of  Boston  the  claim  to  be  the  "cradle 
of  American  liberty."  Still,  the  public-school  system,  which 
spread  from  New  England  to  the  middle  colonies,  did  not  touch 
the  region  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line.1  It  is  only  since 
the  Civil  War  that  the  Southern  states  have  grappled  seriously 
with  the  problems  of  the  free  public  school. 

Although  the  usual  seventeenth-century  idea  of  a  Church 
established  and  maintained  by  the  authority  of  the  state  pre- 
vailed in  all  of  the  colonies  except  Rhode  Island  and  Pennsyl- 
vania, it  was  only  in  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut  that 
religion  was  cherished  with  persecuting  ardor  and  that  the  clergy 
became  autocrats  not  only  in  questions  of  doctrine  and  morals 
but  in  practical  politics  as  well.  Perhaps  the  most  deplorable 

1The  last  royal  governor  of  North  Carolina  (Martin)  said  that  there  were  but 
two  public  schools  in  the  colony  in  his  day.  The  more  prosperous  colony  of  South 
Carolina  had  only  three  grammar  schools  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Noah 
Webster  asserts  that  in  1785  Connecticut  alone  had  a  greater  output  of  news- 
papers than  all  the  states  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  17 

chapters  in  our  colonial  annals  are  the  grim  but  fascinating 
pictures  of  Puritan  intolerance,  in  which  the  common  human 
passions  and  affections  struggle  to  pierce  the  cold  mists  of  a 
repellent  Calvinism,  like  the  veiled  sun  on  a  late  November 
afternoon.  The  "saints"  of  Massachusetts  had  nothing  to  learn 
from  Archbishop  Laud  in  "  keeping  the  Lord's  temple  unde- 
filed."  In  a  convention  held  at  Newtown  (Cambridge)  only 
seven  years  after  Winthrop's  company  arrived,  they  found 
eighty-two  "damnable  errors  and  heresies"  in  the  colony,  which 
were  punished  with  suitable  whippings,  fines,  and  imprison- 
ments. They  banished  clergymen  who  attempted  to  use  the 
prayer  book  like  bishops,  "those  biting  beasts  and  whelps  of  the 
Roman  litter,  those  knobs  and  wens  and  bunchy  Popish  flesh." 
They  drove  Roger  Williams  out  into  the  snows  of  a  New  Eng- 
land winter  to  find  a  refuge  among  the  more  merciful  Indians. 
They  hanged  Quakers  on  Boston  Common  and  yielded  to  a 
perfect  panic  of  persecuting  zeal  when  a  few  poor  old  toothless, 
mumbling  women  were  convicted  of  being  the  agents  of  Satan 
in  bewitching  the  senses  of  the  people  of  God.  Nineteen  persons 
were  hanged  and  one  old  man  was  crushed  to  death  under 
weights  before  the  enormity  of  the  witchcraft  delusion  was 
exorcised  from  the  minds  of  the  Massachusetts  magistrates 
(1692).  To  understand  the  typical  Puritan  of  seventeenth- 
century  Boston  one  should  read  the  diary  of  Judge  Samuel 
Sewall,  prominent  in  the  witchcraft  hunt  though  later  repent- 
ing, and  see  him  at  his  "awful  but  pleasing  Christmas  diversion" 
of  arranging  the  coffins  in  the  family  vault,  or  deliberately 
driving  his  careless  young  son,  by  "strong  representations  of 
hell,"  into  a  terrified  conviction  of  original  sin,  or  pressing  his 
third  courtship  with  a  slyly  amorous  pomposity. 

The  Church  of  England  was  generally  established  in  the 
colonies  of  the  South,  but  religion  was  rather  an  amenity  than 
a  stern  duty  in  those  regions.  The  intense  speculation  and  dog- 
matic interest  and  the  inquisitorial  guardianship  of  society 
which  characterized  Puritan  New  England  were  lacking.  The 
Episcopal  Church  of  Virginia  and  the  Carolinas  has  been  called 
with  kindly  humor  "a  gentlemen's  club  with  a  faint  interest  in 


1 8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

religion."  The  middle  colonies  showed  a  mingling  of  types  in 
religion  as  in  political  and  industrial  life.  Anglicanism  came  as 
far  north  as  New  York ;  Puritanism  went  as  far  south  as  Mary- 
land. The  two  colonies  which  remained  under  the  government 
of  proprietors  until  the  American  Revolution  (Maryland  and 
Pennsylvania-Delaware)  were  founded  as  refuges  for  the  two 
extreme  forms  of  religious  faith  and  worship:  Maryland  for 
the  Roman  Catholics,  Pennsylvania  for  the  Quakers.  But  the 
leveling  influences  of  British  trade  and  a  varied  immigration 
soon  showed  themselves  in  these  colonies.  Lord  Baltimore  had 
invited  people  of  all  religious  faiths  to  come  to  his  colony,  forbid- 
ding only  "unreasonable  disputations  on  points  of  religion  tend- 
ing to  the  disturbance  of  the  public  peace" ;  and  before  the  end 
of  the  seventeenth  century  the  Catholics  in  his  province  were 
outnumbered  by  the  Protestants  more  than  two  to  one.  Penn 
was  forbidden  by  his  charter  to  exclude  Episcopalians  from 
his  province.  But  the  prohibition  was  unnecessary,  for  the 
Quaker  proprietor  welcomed  good  men  of  every  creed  and  prac- 
tice in  religion.  Even  Roman  Catholics,  who  were  excluded 
from  the  colonies  quite  generally,1  were  allowed  in  Pennsyl- 
vania, although  the  officials  were  scolded  by  the  proprietor  for 
"suffering  the  scandal  of  the  mass  to  be  publickly  celebrated." 
A  visitor  traveling  through  the  colonies  at  the  close  of  the 
seventeenth  century  would  cross  miles  of  wilderness  by  rude 
roads  between  little  groups  of  settlements  which  formed  the 
nuclei  of  our  states.  He  would  meet  few  fellow  travelers,  as 
his  horse  brushed  the  branches  of  encroaching  maples  or  waded 
the  muddy  creeks,  for  such  intercolonial  trade  as  there  was  went 
by  the  coast  waters.  He  would  find  a  fairly  homogeneous 
population  of  farmers,  growing  poorer  and  sparser  as  they 
pushed  the  first  feeble  wave  of  what  was  destined  to  be  a  mighty 

ifiesides  Maryland  the  only  colonies  that  tolerated  the  Catholics  were  Rhode 
Island  and  Pennsylvania.  The  reason  was  political  rather  than  dogmatic.  The 
Catholics  quite  generally  refused  to  take  the  oath  to  support  the  Protestant 
throne  in  England,  against  which  the  Pope  had  launched  his  anathema  in  the 
sixteenth  century.  The  oath  called  for  a  disavowal  of  the  Pope's  act,  which  a 
good  Catholic  could  not  make. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  19 

flood  of  westward  migration  against  the  foothills  of  the  Alle- 
ghenies.  He  would  discover  that  the  pioneers  of  the  "back 
country"  were  already  of  a  somewhat  hostile  disposition  to  the 
richer  merchants  and  planters  of  the  coast  region,  who  lent  them 
money  at  high  rates  of  interest  and  seemed  singularly  unrespon- 
sive to  their  efforts  to  extend  the  colony's  territory.  Still,  the 
wide  chasm  that  yawns  in  our  present-day  civilization  between 
rich  and  poor  he  would  not  find.  The  slum-dweller  and  the 
multimillionaire  were  alike  unknown  to  the  seventeenth  century, 
for  the  great  industrial  age  which  has  gathered  our  people  into 
the  cities  where  the  slums  are  bred  and  our  capital  into  the  hands 
of  promoters  of  industry  on  a  world  scale  had  not  yet  dawned. 
He  might  see  a  "common  scold"  gagged  and  set  in  her  own  door- 
way as  a  warning  to  passers-by,  or  a  youth  having  his  tongue 
bored  through  with  a  hot  skewer  for  swearing,  or  a  criminal  on 
the  scaffold  being  terrorized  by  the  minister's  vivid  description 
of  the  everlasting  torture  into  which  he  would  presently  be 
launched  as  the  noose  tightened  around  his  neck.  For  the  age 
was  not  delicate  in  act  or  speech.  In  most  of  the  colonies  a  score 
and  more  of  crimes  and  sins  were  punishable  by  death,  while  the 
stocks,  public  whippings,  brandings,  and  mutilations  were  the 
edifying  chastisements  for  minor  offenses. 

We  look  back  on  these  early  settlers  of  America  as  the  found- 
ers of  a  nation,  viewing  their  struggles  and  hardships,  their  first 
steps  in  self-government,  their  courageous  challenge  to  the  wil- 
derness, in  the  light  of  subsequent  events  which  made  us  a  free, 
united,  democratic  people.  But  if  the  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence and  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  were  latent  in  the 
Virginia  assembly  and  the  New  England  town  meetings,  the  col- 
onists could  not  know  it.  They  came  to  these  shores  with  a  much 
more  modest  purpose  than  the  establishment  of  a  mighty  repub- 
lic. They  were  groups  of  refugees  seeking  an  asylum  from 
religious  coercion,  or  business  adventurers  seeking  first  the  gold, 
gems,  and  silks  of  the  Orient  and  falling  into  contentment  with 
the  more  prosaic  products  of  furs,  fish,  tobacco,  lumber,  and 
rice.  They  were  the  first  Americans,  but  they  were  already 
Englishmen  of  the  seventeenth  century ;  and  in  spite  of  all  their 


20  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

quarrel  with  the  religious  and  political  establishments  of  that 
century,  they  breathed  its  economic  and  social  atmosphere. 
They  were  not  liberal,  tolerant,  or  humane*,  as  we  understand 
those  words.  Even  in  the  colony  in  which  Puritanism  reigned 
supreme  the  logical  results  of  Puritanism — political  and  social 
equality — were  far  from  being  realized.  During  the  first  half- 
century  of  its  existence  the  Massachusetts  colony  admitted 
only  about  one  in  five  of  its  adult  males  to  the  political  privi- 
leges of  "freemen."  Governor  John  Winthrop  spoke  of  the 
"commons"  and  the  "meaner  sort"  much  as  an  English  lord 
might  have  done,  and  John  Cotton  said  that  he  did  "not  con- 
ceive that  God  did  ordain  democracy  as  a  fit  government  either 
for  Church  or  Commonwealth."1 

But  the  fathers  builded  better  than  they  knew.  Separated  by 
the  wide  ocean  from  the  autocracies  and  aristocracies  of  the  Old 
World,  from  its  imposing  ecclesiastical  establishments  and  its 
incessant  political  rivalries,  confronted  with  the  stern  practical 
tasks  of  building  their  new  homes,  of  providing  defense  against 
the  Indians,  of  devising  forms  of  government  and  justice,  of  de- 
veloping lines  of  commerce,  of  assimilating  newcomers  of  varied 
race  and  faith,  the  colonists  learned  gradually  to  lay  aside  the 
stiffness  of  manner  and  theory  that  characterized  the  English- 
man of  the  seventeenth  century  and  became  democratic,  in- 
ventive, quick-witted,  confident.  They  ceased  to  be  Englishmen 
and  became  Americans. 

BRITISH  CONTROL  IN  THE  COLONIES 

Because  the  American  colonies  broke  away  from  the  mother 
country  by  armed  revolution  in  the  last  quarter  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  it  has  been  too  common  a  practice  among  historians 
to  regard  the  whole  colonial  period  in  the  light  of  that  event, 
representing  England  as  a  kind  of  stepmother  endeavoring  to 

1  Winthrop  wrote  to  Thomas  Hooker,  the  founder  of  the  Connecticut  colony, 
in  1638  advising  against  consulting  the  people  at  large  in  the  government,  "  quia 
the  best  part  is  always  the  least  and  of  that  best  part  the  wiser  part  is  always  the 
lesser."  Cotton  found  sanction  in  the  Bible  for  life  tenure  for  higher  magistrates. 
The  great  mass  of  the  inhabitants  of  Massachusetts,  says  Osgood,  were  "  mutes." 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  21 

impose  her  harsh  will  on  her  reluctant  adolescent  children.  This 
is  an  entire  misconception  of  the  situation.  The  colonies  were 
part  and  parcel  of  the  English  state.  Their  settlers  were  in 
overwhelming  majority  English  subjects,  who  carried  with  them 
the  language,  law,  institutions,  and  traditions  of  England.  If 
the  colonies  are  called  "foreign  plantations"  in  the  official  lan- 
guage of  the  time,  the  adjective  in  the  phrase  is  used  in  its  literal 
sense  of  "distant,"  and  not  at  all  as  a  synonym  of  "alien."  They 
were  not  conquered  provinces  on  whose  inhabitants  England 
was  seeking  to  put  the  imprint  of  her  civilization  (as  we  are 
attempting  to  do  in  the  Philippines,  for  example),  but  rather 
outlying  parts  of  a  nation  that  had  just  become  very  conscious 
of  its  unity.  That  the  union  between  the  colonies  and  the 
mother  country  was  severed  was  due  neither  to  deliberate  op- 
pression nor  to  willful  provocation  on  England's  part,  but  rather 
to  certain  features  in  the  government  of  England ;  namely,  jth& 
lack  of  developed  organs  of  colonial  administration,  the  stormy 
political  history  of  the  Stuart  dynasty,  and  the  prevalence  of  the 
so-called  mercantile  theory  of  trade.  As  the  failure  of  England 
to  secure  and  maintain  effective  control  of  the  colonies  is  the 
basic  fact  of  American  history,  we  may  profitably  examine  the 
causes  of  that  failure. 

In  accordance  with  the  accepted  doctrine  of  the  age  of  dis- 
covery, mariners  and  explorers  were  in  the  king's  service,  and 
the  lands  which  they  might  find  were  taken  possession  of  in  the 
name  and  for  the  use  of  the  sovereign.  So  John  Cabot's  discovery 
of  Labrador  in  1497  constituted  the  title  of  the  English  crown  to 
the  whole  continent  of  America.1  During  the  seventeenth 

lfThis  was  a  principle  on  which  the  English  acted  consistently  throughout 
our  colonial  history.  In  1623  they  complained  of  the  Dutch  established  on  the 
Hudson  as  "interlopers."  The  charter  of  Charles  II  to  the  Duke  of  York  in  1664 
granted  as  "unoccupied  territory"  land  that  had  been  settled  by  the  Dutch  for 
fifty  years.  The  French  governor  of  Canada,  anticipated  by  Dongan  in  the 
occupation  of  the  upper  Hudson,  complained  that  "the  king  of  England  did 
grasp  at  all  America."  And  Washington,  in  his  embassy  to  the  French  com- 
manders in  the  wilderness  of  what  is  now  western  Pennsylvania  (1753),  was 
ordered  by  Governor  Dinwiddie  of  Virginia  to  warn  them  off  of  territory  "so 
notoriously  known  to  be  the  property  of  the  crown  of  Great  Britain." 


22  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

century  the  Stuart  kings  parceled  out  the  American  coast  to  va- 
rious chartered  companies  or  individual  proprietors  or  boards  of 
proprietors,  granting  them  not  only  the  right  to  the  soil  but  also 
various  powers  of  government.  The  king  never  meant  that 
either  soil  or  inhabitants  should  pass  out  of  the  control  of  the 
crown.  Companies  and  proprietors  exercised  only  a  delegated 
authority.  We  have  constant  examples  in  the  early  history  o.f 
the  colonies  of  the  interposition  of  the  will  of  the  king.  IJe 
stopped  emigrant  vessels  in  the  Thames,  requiring  the  pas- 
sengers to  take  the  oath  of  allegiance  before  sailing  for  America. 
He  repeatedly  sent  commissioners  to  the  colonies  to  carry  his 
royal  commands  and  to  conduct  investigations  of  the  govern- 
ment. He  ordered  his  law  officers  to  bring  action  in  the  English 
courts  to  annul  the  charters  of  Virginia  and  Massachusetts,  and 
even  without  the  formality  of  a  legal  process  resumed  the 
powers  of  government  which  he  had  granted  to  Lord  Baltimore 
and  William  Penn.1 

But  if  the  theory  of  the  king's  sovereignty  in  the  colonies  was 
complete,  the  exercise  of  it  was  far  from  perfect.  Organs  of 
administration  were  lacking  both  in  the  colonies  and  in  England 
to  maintain  the  authority  of  the  crown.  For  fifty  years  and 
more  after  the  settlement  of  Jamestown  there  was  no  permanent 
'  body  or  committee  in  the  English  state  whose  business  it  was 
to  supervise  the  colonies;  neither  was  there  during  that  same 
half-century  a  single  colony  on  the  mainland  of  America  (with 
the  exception  of  Virginia  after  1624)  in  which  there  was  a  single 
official  appointed  by  the  English  crown  and  directly  responsible 
thereto.  From  time  to  time  under  the  early  Stuarts  (1603- 
1649)  and  the  Interregnum  (1649-1660)  committees  or  boards 
of  privy  councilors,  merchants  or  members  of  Parliament,  were 
charged  with  colonial  business.  For  example,  a  Council  of  Trade 
was  appointed  by  James  I  in  1622  "to  see  how  our  laws  do  now 

1  William  III,  because  of  "great  neglect  and  miscarriage  in  the  government" 
of  Pennsylvania,  exposing  the  colony  to  danger  from  the  French,  put  Penn's 
colony  under  the  governor  of  New  York  for  two  years  (1692-1694).  Maryland, 
taken  by  the  crown  in  1690,  was  not  restored  until  the  fifth  Lord  Baltimore 
turned  Protestant  (1715). 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  23 

stand  in  force  for  prohibiting  of  merchandise  to  be  carried  in 
forraine  bottoms."  A  commission  of  twelve  privy  councilors 
was  created  by  Charles  I  in  1634  with  most  extensive  "power 
of  protection  and  government"  over  the  colonies,  including  even 
the  right  to  remove  colonial  governors  and  visit  offenses  against 
the  king  with  the  death  penalty.  A  board  of  six  lords  and 
twelve  commoners  (including  the  great  names  of  John  Pym 
and  Oliver  Cromwell)  was  appointed  by  the  Long  Parlia- 
ment in  1643,  with  power  to  remove  colonial  officials.  But 
the  actual  interference  of  these  boards  and  committees  with 
the  affairs  of  the  colonies  was  slight.  Immersed  in  the  tur- 
bulent stream  of  English  politics,  separated  by  the  ocean 
from  the  American  colonies,  the  councilors  generally  took  the 
view  expressed  by  an  eighteenth-century  writer  that  the  "  plan- 
tations were  but  inconsiderable  and  distant  parcels"  of  the 
British  domain.  It  was  only  on  the  eve  of  the  American  Revo-| 
lution  that  a  special  department  of  state  was  created  to  deal! 
with  colonial  affairs  and  Lord  Hillsborough  was  placed  at  its 
head  (1768). 

Parliament  counted  for  next  to  nothing  in  the  government  of 
the  colonies  in  the  seventeenth  century.  For  a  full  half  of  the 
time  between  James  I's  accession  and  the  civil  war  it  was  not  in 
session,  and  even  when  it  was  in  session  it  was  fully  occupied  in 
endeavoring  to  assert  its  rights  against  the  Stuart  prerogative. 
On  the  one  or  two  occasions  on  which  Parliament  showed  any 
inclination  to  interfere  in  colonial  questions  (for  example,  the 
control  of  the  American  fisheries  in  1621  or  the  investigation  of 
the  charges  brought  against  Virginia  in  1624)  it  was  rebuked 
by  the  king  and  told  that  such  matters  were  reserved  exclusively 
for  his  privy  council.  The  civil  war  brought  the  famous  Long 
Parliament  to  the  top  for  a  few  years,  when  an  ambitious  plan 
of  colonial  control  was  announced.  But  political  and  religious 
faction  was  so  rife  that  Cromwell  extinguished  the  liberties 
of  Parliament  as  completely  as  either  of  his  Stuart  predeces- 
sors had  done.  With  the  Restoration  of  1660  Parliament  be- 
came an  almost  continuous  body  and  began  in  earnest  to  enact 
laws  for  the  regulation  of  colonial  trade  and  to  recommend 


24  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

investigations  of  colonial  administration.  But  by  that  time  the 
political  habits  of  the  colonies  were  fixed. 

During  the  whole  of  the  seventeenth  century  the  conflicting 
authorities  of  crown  and  Parliament,  of  royal  prerogative  and 
representative  legislation,  of  government  by  divine  will  and 
government  by  the  will  of  the  nation,  were  engaged  in  a  bitter 
struggle  in  England.  It  is  not  surprising,  then,  that  there  was 
no  effective  assertion  of  either  of  these  types  of  authority  in  the 
colonies.  Every  time  that  the  king  set  out  to  assert  his  authority 
in  the  colonies  he  was  thwarted  by  the  turn  of  political  events  in 
England.  Charles  I  came  to  the  throne  proclaiming  his  "full 
resolution  that  there  be  one  uniform  Course  of  Government  in 
and  through  our  whole  Monarchic."  The  careful  instructions 
to  his  royal  governor  in  Virginia  (1628),  the  appointment  of  a 
commission  of  privy  councilors  on  colonial  affairs  (1634),  the 
proceedings  instituted  to  deprive  Massachusetts  of  her  charter 
(1635),  and  the  appointment  of  a  special  customs  officer  in 
Virginia  (1636)  all  point  to  a  policy  of  royal  control.  But  at  the 
critical  moment  the  outbreak  of  the  Scottish  rebellion  diverted 
Charles  from  his  purpose  and  involved  him  in  a  civil  war  which 
was  to  end  only  with  his  execution.  The  Interregnum  was  a 
period  of  such  instability  that  Cromwell,  in  spite  of  a  sincere 
interest  in  the  colonies,  was  unable  to  develop  any  consistent 
policy  of  dealing  with  them  in  his  short  tenure  of  power.  Of 
course,  as  a  Puritan,  his  sympathies  were  with  New  England, 
where  the  powerful  colony  of  Massachusetts  Bay  needed  no 
lessons  in  " independency"  from  the  master  of  the  English 
Independents.1 

A  very  vigorous  policy  of  colonial  regulation  was  initiated  at 
the  accession  of  Charles  II.  Standing  councils  for  trade  and 
plantations  were  created,  in  order  that  "so  many  remote  colonies 

XA  curious  attempt  at  the  exercise  of  dictatorial  power  in  the  colonies  was 
made  by  Cromwell  when  he  tried  to  remove  the  entire  population  of  Massa- 
chusetts to  the  island  of  Jamaica,  which  he  had  conquered  from  Spain  (1655). 
He  had  to  reduce  Virginia  to  obedience  by  show  of  force,  Governor  Berkeley 
calling  the  parliamentary  leaders  "bloody  tyrants"  and  declaring  that  Virginia 
did  not  "conceive  allegiance  due  to  every  faction  which  might  possess  itself  of 
Westminster  Hall." 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  25 

and  governments,  so  many  ways  considerable  to  our  crown  and 
dignity,  should  be  collected  and  brought  under  such  a  uniform 
inspection  and  conduct  that  we  may  better  supply  our  royal 
counsells  to  their  future  regulation,  securitie,  and  improve- 
ment." At  the  same  time  Parliament  began  to  legislate  for 
colonial  trade  by  the  famous  Navigation  Acts  (which  we  shall 
notice  presently),  passed  in  1660  and  1663.  Furthermore,  in 
the  first  four  years  of  his  reign  Charles  II  gave  charters  to 
Connecticut  and  Rhode  Island,  conferred  the  vast  grant  of 
Carolina  on  a  board  of  eight  proprietors,  granted  the  land  be- 
tween the  Connecticut  and  Delaware  Rivers  to  his  brother,  the 
Duke  of  York,  and  sent  a  commission  of  four  men  to  the  north- 
ern colonies  (which  Lord  Clarendon  declared  were  already 
"hardening  into  republics")  to  inquire  into  their  religious, 
political,  and  economic  condition  and  to  make  them  understand 
once  for  all  that  the  king's  authority  must  be  respected.  "The 
King  did  not  grant  away  his  Soveraigntie  over  you  when  he  made 
you  a  corporation,"  said  the  commissioners  to  the  Massachusetts 
magistrates. 

But  again  European  events  intervened  to  postpone  the  exe- 
cution of  this  vigorous  colonial  policy  of  the  early  years  of 
Charles  II.  Lord  Clarendon  fell  from  power  in  1667  and  Eng- 
land joined  Holland  and  Sweden  in  the  Triple  Alliance  against 
Louis  XIV.  A  tumultuous  period  followed,  filled  with  Dutch 
wars,  Exclusion  Bills,  and  Popish  Plots,  with  fears  of  France 
and  Rome,  and  factions  of  Whig  and  Tory.  When  order  was 
restored  and  the  succession  to  the  throne  assured  to  the  Duke 
of  York,  the  policy  of  colonial  regulation  was  again  resumed. 
The  Massachusetts  charter  was  taken  away  by  Charles  II  in 
1684,  and  his  brother  James,  who  came  to  the  throne  the  next 
year,  proceeded  to  confiscate  the  other  charters  and  to  unite  the 
northern  colonies  from  Mount  Desert  to  Delaware  Bay  in  a 
single  great  viceroyalty  under  Sir  Edmund  Andros. 

The  career  of  Andros  (1686-1689),  who  was  not  an  "odious 
tyrant"  but  an  able  and  conscientious  servant,  is  one  of  the  best- 
known  and  most  important  episodes  in  all  our  colonial  history. 
It  marks  the  climax  of  the  Stuart  policy  in  America.  Had  this 


26  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

most  ambitious  plan  of  colonial  control  in  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury succeeded,  every  charter  in  the  colonies  would  have  been 
annulled,  royal  officials  would  have  taken  the  place  of  elected 
officers,  the  courts  would  have  been  only  inferior  jurisdictions 
with  appeal  to  England,  the  viceroyal  council  would  have  framed 
and  promulgated  all  the  laws,  English  "redcoats"  (sixty  of, 
whom  had  come  over  in  the  man-of-war  with  Andros)  would 
have  formed  the  nucleus  of  a  mixed  army  in  the  colonies,  Eng- 
lish men-of-war  would  have  patrolled  the  American  coast,  the 
Anglican  Church  would  have  been  established  in  the  stronghold 
of  Puritanism,  taxes  would  have  been  arbitrarily  levied  by  order 
of  the  governor  and  council,  the  ungranted  land  of  the  province 
would  have  been  resumed  by  the  crown,  and  quitrents  would 
have  been  collected  from  the  occupied  portions  as  a  sign  and 
symbol  of  English  sovereignty.1  But  the  structure  of  abso- 
lutism reared  by  Andros  in  the  colonies  went  down  with  the  col- 
lapse of  Stuart  despotism  in  England.  Under  the  new  king, 
William  III,  defender  of  Parliament  and  Protestantism,  of 
Magna  Carta  and  the  Bill  of  Rights,  every  American  colony 
was  assured  of  its  legislative  assembly,  its  free  tenure  of 
land,  its  unimpeded  administration  of  justice,  and  its  liberty  of 
worship. 

1The  quitrent  was  a  small  land  tax  paid  to  the  crown  in  England.  As  the 
name  implies,  it  was  a  commutation  or  relief,  to  be  "quit"  of  the  feudal  dues 
of  the  medieval  period.  The  king  generally  made  over  to  the  proprietors  of  the 
American  provinces  this  right  of  collecting  quitrents,  but  as  the  colonists 
repudiated  all  feudal  obligations  as  barbarous  and  outgrown,  they  saw  no 
reason  why  they  should  be  taxed  for  their  commutation.  The  quitrent,  there- 
fore, was  resisted  successfully  in  all  the  colonies  except  Maryland.  In  England 
the  quitrent  might  be  in  the  nature  of  a  relief,  but  in  America  it  looked  like  a 
plain  tax.  There  was  no  sign  of  the  quitrent  in  New  England,  and  when  Andros 
revived  the  doctrine  that  the  soil  belonged  to  the  crown  and  called  the  Indian 
signatures  to  deeds  to  be  of  no  more  account  than  "a  scratch  of  a  bear's  paw," 
the  Reverend  John  Higginson  of  Salem  replied  for  the  men  of  the  colony,  "We 
received  only  the  right  and  power  of  Government  from  the  King's  Charter  .  .  . 
but  the  right  of  the  Land  and  Soil  we  received  from  God  according  to  his 
Grand  Charter  to  the  Sons  of  Adam  and  Noah,  and  with  the  consent  of 
the  Native  Inhabitants."  This  supernal  charter  could  hardly  hold  good  in 
English  law. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  27 

Thus,  four  times  in  the  seventeenth  century — in  the  decades 
beginning  with  the  years  1631,  1651,  1661,  1681 — England 
entered  on  a  more  or  less  vigorous  colonial  policy,  and  four 
times  political  exigencies  thwarted  her  plans.1  Meantime,  while 
England  blew  hot  and  cold,  the  colonies  were  steadily  develop- 
ing from  what  were  originally  trading  companies  or  bands  of 
refugees  into  political  communities,  more  and  more  conscious 
of  their  social  and  economic  interests,  more  and  more  jealous 
of  the  rights  of  their  popular  assemblies,  more  and  more 
thoroughly  equipped  with  both  the  organs  and  the  habits  of 
self-government. 

Whether  this  development  could  have  been  hindered,  had  the 
English  government  consistently  realized  it  (as  did  a  few  men 
in  England,  like  Gorges,  Mason,  and  Randolph),  is  a  question 
that  it  is  useless  to  discuss.  The  fact  is  that  the  English  govern- 
ment did  not  realize  it.  England  persisted  in  viewing  the  colo- 
nies primarily  as  areas  of  production  and  marts  of  trade,  and  to 
this  view  she  subordinated  all  her  theories  of  political  control. 
This  misconception  of  the  true  nature  of  colonies  was  not  due 
to  caprice  or  deliberate  oppression  on  England's  part.  It  was 
the  generally  accepted  idea  of  overseas  colonies,  fitting  the 
prevalent  " mercantile  theory"  in  economics,  which  held  that 
a  nation's  prosperity  was  measured  by  the  amount  of  precious 
metals  that  it  could  amass  by  favorable  trade  balances.  To  sell 
abroad,  therefore,  as  much  as  possible  for  money,  and  to  buy 
abroad  with  its  own  manufactures  such  raw  materials  or  such 
indispensable  supplies  for  its  navy  or  food  for  its  people  as 
it  could  not  produce  at  home,  was  every  country's  ideal  of 
commerce.  And  the  value  of  colonies  was  that  they  furnished 
at  the  same  time  both  the  raw  materials,  foodstuffs,  and  sup- 
plies that  the  home  country  needed  and  the  market  for  her 

irThat  England's  policy,  however,  stiffened  in  this  period  is  shown  by  a  com- 
parison of  the  charters  granted  to  Lord  Baltimore  (1632)  and  William  Penn 
(1680).  Baltimore  was  given  virtually  unlimited  powers  in  his  province,  while 
Penn  was  obliged  to  keep  an  agent  in  London,  to  admit  Anglicans  to  his  colony, 
and  to  submit  to  the  right  of  the  king  to  veto  his  laws  and  of  Parliament  to 
tax  his  people. 


28  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

manufactured  goods.  Scholars  have  called  the  policy  which  tried 
to  realize  this  ideal  of  commerce  the  "Old  Colonial  System." 
From  the  day  when  James  I  prohibited  the  planters  of  Virginia 
and  the  Somers  Islands  from  sending  their  tobacco  to  any  coun- 
try but  England  (1621)  down  to  the  outbreak  of  the  American 
Revolution  a  century  and  a  half  later,  the  trade  of  the  colonies 
was  regulated  by  various  Orders  in  Council  and  statutes  of 
Parliament.  The  most  important  of  these  regulations  are  con- 
tained in  the  Navigation  Acts,  or  Acts  of  Trade,  of  the  second 
half  of  the  seventeenth  century.  They  laid  the  basis  of  the  Old 
Colonial  System  and  were,  in  the  clauses  which  applied  to 
America,  briefly  as  follows  : 

1.  An  act  of  1651,  forbidding  the  products  of  Asia,  Africa,  and 
America  to  be  carried  to  ports  within  the  dominion  of  England  except 
in  vessels  owned  and  in  major  part  manned  by  English  subjects  ;  and 
forbidding  the  goods  of  Europe  to  be  brought  to  such  ports  except  in 
English  ships  or  ships  belonging  to  the  country  in  which  the  goods 
were  produced  or  to  the  ports  from  which  they  were  usually  shipped.1 

2.  An  act  of  1660,  reenacting  the  provisions  of  the  act  of  1651,  and 
also  specifying  certain  important  products  of  the  plantations,  called 
"enumerated  commodities,"  including  tobacco,  sugar,  cotton,  wool, 
indigo,  ginger,  and  dyes,  which  could  be  exported  from  the  colonies 
only  to  England  or  to  other  colonies  of  England.    Ships  leaving  an 
English  port  for  the  American  colonies  had  to  give  a  bond  with  the 
chief  customs  officer  of  the  port  that  if  they  loaded  in  the  colonies 
with  any  of  the  enumerated  articles,  they  would  bring  them  back 
directly  to  England  ;  and  ships  from  Europe  visiting  the  colonies  had 
to  deposit  a  similar  bond  with  the  governor  of  the  colony  in  whose 
port  they  were  lading.2 


act,  aimed  against  the  carrying  trade  of  the  Dutch,  did  not  hinder  the 
colonies  from  buying  or  selling  where  they  pleased  in  Europe  if  the  vessels  they 
traded  in  were  British  built,  owned,  and  manned. 

2  This  important  act  determined  not  only  the  kind  of  vessels  in  which  colonial 
goods  should  be  carried  but  also  the  destination  of  certain  of  these  goods.  The 
student  will  note,  however,  that  with  the  exception  of  tobacco  the  enumerated 
articles  of  1660  are  all  products  of  the  West  Indies  rather  than  of  the  American 
mainland.  They  were  articles  which  did  nbt  compete  with  English  production, 
henqe  they  had  a  favored  market  in  the  mother  country. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  29 

3.  An  act  of  1663,  providing  that  all  goods  imported  into  the  Amer- 
ican colonies  (except salt  for  the  fisheries, provisions, horses  and  servants 
from  Ireland  and  Scotland,  and  wines  from  Madeira  and  the  Azores) 
must  first  be  brought  into  English  ports  and  there  be  reshipped.1 

4.  An  act  of  1672,  providing  that  specified  duties  should  be  col- 
lected in  the  colonies  on  all  enumerated  articles  loaded  on  ships  whose 
masters  did  not  give  *the  bond  required  by  the  act  of  1660.    Those 
duties  should  be  paid  in  the  colonies,  at  such  places  and  to  such 
officers  as  the  commissioners  of  customs  in  England  might  designate.2 

5.  An  act  of  1696,  reaffirming  the  acts  of  Charles  II's  reign  and 
containing  stringent  clauses  for  securing  the  responsibility  of  revenue 
officers,  with  penalties  for  smuggling  or  false  registry ;  and  authoriz- 
ing collectors  and  inspectors  to  visit  and  search  ships,  wharves,  or 
warehouses  to  seize  unlawful  merchandise.3 

Now  these  measures  of  the  Old  Colonial  System  were  enacted 
not  at  all  for  the  purpose  of  injuring  the  colonies,  but  rather  of 
mutually  benefiting  the  trade  of  the  colonies  and  the  mother 
country.  They  even  contained  liberal  concessions  to  America 
in  the  way  of  drawbacks,  bounties,  and  prohibition  of  Euro- 
pean competition  in  the  British  markets.  But  for  all  that,  they 
proved  burdensome  to  the  Americans  from  the  outset.  The 
English  market  became  less  and  less  adequate  to  absorb  the 
colonial  tobacco  crop.4  The  duties  collected  on  the  enumerated 

i-This  act  made  England  the  "staple"  for  colonial  trade.  The  duties  collected 
in  English  ports  on  European  goods  destined  for  the  colonies  protected  the  Brit- 
ish merchants  from  competition.  On  articles  which  did  not  compete  with  British 
production  the  duties  were  generally  remitted,  on  reshipment  to  the  colonies,  by 
a  system  of  "drawbacks." 

2  This  was  the  first  act  imposing  duties  to  be  collected  in  the  colonies  by 
revenue  officials  appointed  in  England.  Such  officials  were  actually  designated 
in  Virginia,  the  Carolinas,  New  York,  and  Massachusetts. 

3 This  severe  act  of  1696,  says  Professor  Edward  Channing,  "added  the 
finishing  touch  to  the  colonial  system  so  far  as  shipping  was  concerned.  .  .  . 
All  further  shipping  laws  were  in  the  nature  of  detailed  regulations"  to  carry 
out  the  law  of  1696.  The  text  of  the  acts  above  tabulated  may  be  found  most 
conveniently  in  Professor  William  MacDonald's  "Select  Charters  Illustrative  of 
American  History,  1606-1775,"  Nos.  22,  23,  28,  34,  43. 

4 The  20,000  pounds  of  Virginia  tobacco  exported  in  1619  grew  to  28,000,000 
pounds  (Virginia  and  Maryland)  by  the  close  of  the  century.  The  colonists 
were  not  allowed  to  sell  an  ounce  of  this  to  Europe;  but  England,  after 


30  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

articles  in  England  were  high,  and  it  was  both  a  nuisance  and 
an  expense  for  vessels  carrying  nonenumerated  goods  from  the 
colonies  direct  to  Europe  (as  they  had  a  right  to  do)  to  be 
obliged  to  bring  their  return  cargoes  home  by  way  of  England 
(act  of  1663)  and  to  suffer  all  the  delay  and  damage  incident 
to  transshipment.  Worst  of  all,  enforcement  of  the  acts  would 
inevitably  mean  a  stricter  political  control  of  the  colonies, 
a  closer  relationship  between  the  governors  and  the  crown, 
the  multiplication  of  royal  officials  in  the  colonies,  and  perhaps 
even  the  presence  of  English  warships  in  American  waters. 

"It  was  far  more  easy/'  says  a  historian  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  "to  enact  these  various  laws  than  to  enforce  their 
punctual  execution.  Even  the  best-affected  colonies, — Barba- 
dos, Virginia,  Maryland, — considering  them  as  inconsistent 
with  their  privileges  and  destructive  of  their  infant  commerce, 
hesitated  to  obey  or  eluded  their  provisions."  As  for  the 
worse-affected  colonies  of  New  England,  "which  trafficked 
without  restraint  wherever  hope  of  gain  attracted  their  navi- 
gators," and  which,  according  to  a  petition  of  English  mer- 
chants to  Parliament,  were  diverting  annually  £60,000  of 
revenue  from  the  treasury  by  their  infractions  of  the  Naviga- 
tion Acts,  it  is  enough  to  read  the  angry  complaint  of  Edward 
Randolph,  who  was  appointed  the  first  collector  of  customs  in 
Massachusetts  (1680) :  "I  am  received  at  Boston  more  like  a 
spy  than  one  of  his  Majesty's  servants.  ...  It  is  in  every 
man's  mouth  that  they,  are  not  subject  to  the  laws  of  England, 
nor  are  they  of  any  force  in  Massachusetts  until  confirmed  by 
them,  and  that  yore  Maty  had  nothing  to  do  with  them,  they 
were  a  free  people."1  The  Navigation  Acts  were  proclaimed 
with  beat  of  drum  in  the  market  place  at  Boston,  but  they  were 

collecting  the  duty  on  it,  reexported  17,580,000  pounds,  or  over  60  per  cent  of 
the  crop,  to  Europe. 

!R.  N.  Toppan,  "Edward  Randolph,"  Vol.  Ill,  pp.  54-64.  A  curious  confirma- 
tion comes  from  another  source  in  the  same  year.  Patoulet,  a  French  intendant 
in  the  West  Indies,  wrote  to  Colbert,  "The  English  who  dwell  near  Boston  will 
not  worry  themselves  about  the  prohibitions  which  the  King  of  England  may 
issue,  because  they  hardly  recognise  his  authority"  (George  Louis  Beer,  "The 
Old  Colonial  System,"  Pt.  I,  Vol.  II,  p.  310). 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  3! 

not  heeded.  King  Charles  seized  the  charter  of  Massachusetts, 
and  King  James  sent  Andros  to  make  Boston  the  capital  of  a 
viceroyal  province  in  America  ;  but  it  was  all  of  no  avail.  The 
New  England  colonies  were  already,  in  the  despairing  phrase 
of  Lord  Clarendon,  "  hardening  into  republics." 

Thus  we  have  seen  that  neither  the  political  nor  the  economic 
control  of  the  American  colonies  by  England  was  realized  in 
the  seventeenth  century.  They  should  have  reenforced  each 
other  in  an  efficient  system.  As  early  as  1623  a  member  of  the 
Virginia  Company  urged  a  stricter  regulation  of  the  colony's 
trade  by  the  crown,  "mutual  commerce  being  the  strongest 
bond  that  will  unite  Virginia  to  this  state."  Again,  under  the 
Protectorate  of  Oliver  Cromwell  (1656)  an  influential  mer- 
chant named  Povey  presented  an  "  Overture"  to  the  Council 
of  State,  with  the  purpose  of  consolidating  the  economic  re- 
sources of  the  realm  in  its  war  with  Spain:  "to  reduce  all 
Collonies  and  Plantations  to  a  more  certaine  civill  and  uniforme 
waie  of  Government  and  distribution  of  publick  justice  .  .  . 
that  our  shipping  may  be  increased,  our  poore  here  employed, 
and  our  manufactures  encouraged  .  .  .  and  by  generall  con- 
sequences hereof  a  considerable  Revenue  may  be  raised  to  his 
Highness."  As  it  became  evident  that  the  Acts  of  Trade,  so  far 
from  bringing  the  colonies  into  closer  political  dependence  on 
England,  needed  themselves  just  that  condition  of  colonial 
dependence  in  order  to  be  effective,  the  English  government 
set  itself  seriously  to  work  in  the  latter  half  of  the  seventeenth 
century  to  supply  the  deficiency.  But  the  colonies  were  already 
in  a  sense  beyond  English  control.  Self-direction  was  growing 
into  a  habit  with  them,  not  so  much  from  any  deliberate  plan 
as  from  the  simple  facts  of  their  situation  and  settlement.  For 
we  must  remember  that  the  colonies  were  separated  by  three 
thousand  miles  of  ocean  from  the  homeland,  and  that  even 
under  the  most  favorable  conditions  it  took  three  months 
for  a  communication  and  answer  to  pass  between  them  ;  x  and, 


see  how  this  delay  encouraged  the  "passive  resistance"  of  the  colonies 
to  unwelcome  orders  of  the  king.  The  commissioners  sent  out  in  1664  report 
the  men  of  Massachusetts  as  saying  that  "they  can  easily  spin  out  seven  years 


32  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

furthermore,  that  the  American  colonies  of  England  were  not, 
like  the  distant  colonies  of  the  continental  nations,  founded, 
maintained,  and  garrisoned  at  public  expense,  but  were  adven- 
tures of  private  initiative,  bound  to  the  king  by  allegiance  but 
not  beholden  to  him  for  support.1 

Again,  the  colonists  brought  with  them  the  habit  of  local 
government  in  seventeenth-century  England :  its  county  courts, 
its  parish  vestries,  its  municipal  mayors  and  aldermen,  its  jus- 
tices of  the  peace,  its  constables,  wardens,  and  tithingmen. 
This  all  engendered  a  political  alertness  which  was  in  striking 
contrast  to  the  leveling  and  lulling  despotism  of  the  French 
and  Spanish  colonial  administration.  Being  used  to  manage 
so  much  of  their  own  business,  in  local  meetings  or  provincial 
assemblies,  the  colonists  naturally  wished  to  manage  all  their 
own  business.  They  developed  much  farther  in  the  direction 
of  independent  statehood  than  any  English  county  could,  be- 
cause large  powers  of  government  were  granted  by  the  king's 
charters  to  the  companies  or  proprietors  •  that  founded  them, 
and  the  royal  officials  in  the  colonies  were  very  few  until  the 
appointment  of  customs  officers  to  enforce  the  Navigation  Act 
of  1672. 

Finally,  even  such  delegated  authority  of  the  crown  as  there 
was  in  the  colonies  was  wholly  executive  in  character,  whereas 
the  colonists  looked  to  their  elected  assemblies  as  the  directive 
institution  in  their  political  life.  Governors,  councils,  judges, 
treasurers,  collectors,  surveyors — all  were  there  to  carry  out  the 
will  of  the  people.  We  find  this  theory  of  government  advanced 
not  only  in  " republican"  New  England  but  also  in  proprietary 

in  writing,  and  before  that  time  a  change  may  come."  Charles  II  informed 
them  that  "his  Majesty  did  not  think  of  treating  with  his  own  subjects  as  with 
strangers."  But  geographically  they  were  strangers,  nevertheless,  and  they 
maintained  their  "diplomatic  attitude"  with  striking  success. 

1  Sandys  of  the  Virginia  Company  protested  as  early  as  1623  against  the 
British  monopoly  of  Virginia  tobacco:  "Our  Plantations  were  both  settled  and 
supported  by  the  charge  of  private  adventurers."  The  Massachusetts  Assistants, 
in  1649,  declared  that  their  duty  to  England  was  acquitted  with  the  payment  of 
one  fifth  of  the  gold  and  silver  mined  in  the  colony  and  with  prayers  for 
England's  welfare ! 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  33 

Maryland  and  royal  Virginia.  The  English  Parliament  had 
to  wage  a  long  and  bitter  fight  in  the  seventeenth  century  to 
defend  certain  fundamental  liberties  against  the  encroachment 
of  the  royal  prerogative.  The  American  colonies,  in  a  remote 
and  virgin  land,  were  relieved  of  the  weight  of  that  prerogative. 
With  royal  and  proprietary  appointees  dependent  on  the  grants 
of  their  assemblies  for  their  very  bread,  with  a  trade  rapidly 
outgrowing  and  successfully  defying  the  restraints  put  upon 
it  by  the  home  government,  with  increasing  neglect  and  con- 
tempt of  acts  of  Parliament  strictly  worded  but  laxly  enforced, 
the  colonies  came  to  regard  the  lawful  intervention  of  the  king 
in  their  affairs  like  the  unwarranted  intrusion  of  a  tyrant. 

Today  colonies  in  civilized  lands  are  bound  to  the  mother 
country  generally  by  a  rather  loose  federation,  their  allegiance 
depending  less  on  any  explicit  political  pact  than  on  a  sentiment 
of  pride  in  the  common  glory  of  the  empire.  But  the  theory  of 
colonial  control  prevalent  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries  involved,  as  we  have  seen,  the  strict  regulation  of 
colonial  commerce  in  the  interests  of  national  dominion,  and 
the  responsibility  of  colonial  political  authorities  for  the  main- 
tenance of  the  commercial  system.  To  have  put  this  theory 
into  successful  operation  in  the  American  colonies  would  have 
required  one  of  two  things :  either  a  complete  unity  of  interests 
between  the  colonies  and  the  mother  country  (such  as  was 
assumed  again  and  again  in  the  affable  proclamations  of  Eng- 
lish monarchs  from  Charles  I  to  George  III)  or  the  utter 
subserviency  of  the  colonies  to  the  English  crown  and  Parlia- 
ment. The  first  of  these  alternatives  the  colonies  knew  was 
a  fiction;  the  second  they  felt  was  an  insult.  Here,  then,  in 
the  failure  of  British  control  in  the  colonies  of  the  seven- 
teenth century,  is  the  germ  of  the  American  Revolution.  The 
eighteenth  century  will  only  furnish  the  cumulative  evidence 
of  the  failure  of  the  policy  of  the  seventeenth,  and  in  the  end 
will  dissolve  those  bonds  which  it  is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to 
say  were  never  formed. 


34  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

THE  EXPULSION  OF  THE  FRENCH 

From  the  accession  of  William  of  Orange  to  the  English 
throne,  in  1689,  to  the  fall  of  Quebec,  seventy  years  later,  the 
one  constant  factor  in  the  history  of  the  English  colonies  in 
America  was  the  presence  and  pressure  of  the  French  on  their 
northern  and  western  borders — "the  Gallic  peril."  Estab- 
lished in  permanent  settlements  on  the  shores  of  the  Bay  of 
Fundy  and  the  banks  of  the  St.  Lawrence  at  about  the  same 
time  that  the  English  colonies  were  started  in  Virginia  and 
New  England,1  the  French  had  had  a  very  different  history 
and  development.  The  rapidly  growing  English  colonies  had 
expended  their  energy  intensively  in  economic  and  political 
activities,  cultivating  their  tobacco,  wheat,  and  rice  for  export, 
building  up  their  commercial  ports,  exploiting  the  forests  and 
fisheries  near  their  coasts,  and  developing  their  organs  of  local 
government  in  assemblies,  courts,  vestries,  and  town  meetings. 
The  French  in  Canada,  on  the  other  hand,  forbidden  the 
least  exercise  of  self-government  by  the  despotic  authority  of 
Louis  XIV,  scantily  supplied  with  capital  for  the  cultivation 
of  the  unremunerative  glacial  soil  of  the  St.  Lawrence  valley, 
themselves  but  a  handful  of  men  in  a  vast  wilderness,  found  an 
outlet  for  their  restless  spirits  in  ambitious  schemes  for  winning 
a  continent  for  the  glory  of  France  and  its  savage  tribes  for 
the  Church  of  Rome.  The  story,  in  all  its  thrilling  details  of 
courage  and  pathos,  of  cruelty  and  persecution,  can  be  read  in 
Francis  Parkman's  unrivaled  volumes  on  the  French  in  Amer- 
ica. Before  the  close  of  the  Stuart  period  the  French  adven- 
turers and  missionaries,  the  fur-traders  and  wood-rangers 
(coureurs  de  bois),  had  gone  up  the  St.  Lawrence  and  the  Great 
Lakes,  established  their  forts  and  missions  as  far  west  as  the 
point  of  Lake  Superior,  crossed  the  portages  from  Lakes  Erie 

iPort  Royal,  Acadia,  was  founded  in  1604,  Jamestown  in  1607,  Quebec  in 
1608,  Plymouth  in  1620,  Maryland  in  1632,  Montreal  in  1642.  An  interesting 
anticipation  of  the  long  rivalry  between  France  and  England  in  America  was 
Samuel  Argall's  attack  on  Port  Royal  in  1613,  on  the  ground  that  the  settle- 
ment was  within  the  limits  of  the  Virginia  grant  of  1606. 


G  U 


of  French  and  Indian  War 

r 

93°        Longitude          89°  West 86"  from  81"        Greenwich 


THE  ENCIRCLING  FRENCH 


36  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

and  Michigan  to  the  headwaters  of  the  Ohio  basin,  ascended 
the  Mississippi  to  the  Falls  of  St.  Anthony  (Minneapolis  and 
St.  Paul),  and  finally,  in  the  person  of  the  intrepid  Cavelier 
de  La  Salle,  followed  the  Father  of  Waters  down  to  its  mouth 
and  planted  the  lilies  of  France  on  the  shores  of  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico.  So  the  French  power  extended,  with  its  sparse  cordon 
of  forts,  missions,  and  fur  posts,  in  a  huge  arc  of  twenty-five 
hundred  miles,  from  the  mouth  of  the  St.  Lawrence  to  the 
mouth  of  the  Mississippi  completely  enveloping  the  English 
colonies  on  the  Atlantic  coast.  f 

The  English  began  to  realize  the  "Gallic  peril"  in  the  fateful 
decade  that  saw  the  overthrow  of  the  Stuart  dynasty.  Thomas 
Dongan,  the  Duke  of  York's  able  governor,  arriving  in  his 
American  province  of  New  York  the  year  after  La  Salle  had 
reached  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi  (1683),  found  the  prov- 
ince in  dire  danger.  Count  Frontenac,  governor  of  New  France, 
had  just  completed  a  ten-year  period  of  vigorous  rule  at 
Quebec.  He  had  labored  without  ceasing  to  extend  the  bounds 
of  New  France,  to  increase  its  military  efficiency,  and  to  unite 
its  inhabitants  in  enthusiasm  for  the  maintenance  of  the  power 
of  Louis  XIV  on  the  American  continent.  He  was  especially 
concerned  to  win  the  confidence  of  the  Seneca  Indians,  so 
that  he  might  gain  access  to  the  Ohio  valley  through  their 
lands  to  the  south  of  Lake  Ontario.1  He  even  entertained  the 
hope  of  weaning  the  Iroquois  tribes  from  their  attachment  to 
the  English  and  of  descending  the  valley  of  the  Hudson  with 
his  French  troops  and  Indian  allies  to  drive  the  Duke  of  York's 
governor  from  his  capital.  Thus  he  would  sever  the  New  Eng- 
land colonies  from  their  southern  sisters  and  secure  for  the  king 

1The  Senecas  were  the  westernmost  and  largest  tribe  of  the  Iroquois  Con- 
federacy, a  league  of  five  semicivilized  tribes  extending  across  the  central  part 
of  New  York  from  Lake  Erie  to  the  lower  Mohawk  valley.  In  1609  Champlain, 
by  joining  the  Algonquins  in  a  battle  against  the  Iroquois,  had  inspired  in  the 
latter  a  fierce  hatred  against  the  French,  which  devoted  Jesuit  missionaries  and 
successive  governors  at  Quebec  labored  in  vain  to  remove.  The  friendship  of 
the  Iroquois  proved  of  inestimable  advantage  to  the  English  on  the  Hudson. 
The  Indians  acted  as  a  buffer  against  the  French  and  kept  them  from  reaching 
the  Mississippi  Valley  by  the  easy  route  south  of  the  Great  Lakes. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  37 

of  France  the  finest  harbor  on  the  Atlantic  coast  for  the  ter- 
minal of  the  important  fur  trade  of  the  vast  interior. 

Dongan's  spirited  correspondence  with  Frontenac's  succes- 
sors, La  Barre  and  Denonville,  is  the  first  clear  note  of  defiance 
sounded  by  the  English  against  the  encroachments  of  the 
French.1  Dongan  was  in  the  midst  of  his  ardent  epistolary 
altercation  with  Denonville  when  Governor  Andros  arrived  in 
Boston  (December  20,  1686)  to  fuse  the  colonies  of  New 
England,  with  New  York  and  New  Jersey,  into  a  single  royal 
province. 

We  have  already  noticed  the  mission  of  Andros  as  the  last 
attempt  of  the  Stuarts  to  secure  recognition  of  their  authority 
and  obedience  to  their  commercial  regulation  in  the  American 
colonies  (see  page  25).  But  the  Andros  government  has 
another  aspect  quite  as  important.  It  was  not  only  the  cul- 
mination of  the  Stuart  policy  of  the  seventeenth  century  but 
also  the  foreshadowing  of  the  Hanoverian  policy  of  the  eight- 
eenth; namely,  the  consolidation  of  the  colonies  to  meet  the 
threat  of  the  French  and  Indians  on  their  borders.  Andros 
brought  a  few  British  redcoats  to  Boston  and  made  plans  for 
the  chastisement  of  the  Indians,  who,  under  French  provoca- 
tion, were  threatening  the  settlements  in  Maine  and  New 
Hampshire.  But  he  had  no  support  from  the  colonies.  In 
their  eyes  he  was  a  greater  danger  even  than  the  Indians,  for 
he  was  an  enemy  to  their  chartered  rights,  an  Anglican  infected 
with  "prelatical  corruption,"  and  the  devoted  servant  of  a 
"popish"  king.  Instead  of  trusting  him  to  defend  them  against 

*A  few  years  before  Dongan's  arrival  the  intendant  of  New  France  at  Quebec 
wrote  to  Paris  that  a  "grand  future"  was  before  the  French  in  Canada  and 
that  "the  colonies  of  foreign  nations  (England)  so  long  settled  on  the  seaboard 
[were]  trembling  with  fright"  in  view  of  what  Louis  XIV  had  accomplished. 
But  Dongan's  letters  give  little  hint  of  fear.  The  bluff  old  Irishman  spared 
neither  vituperation  nor  sarcasm.  He  wrote  Denonville  to  know  whether  "a 
few  loose  fellows  rambling  among  the  Indians  to  keep  from  starving  gave 
France  a  right  to  the  country,"  or  the  fact  that  "  some  rivers  or  rivuletts  run  out 
into  the  great  river  of  Canada."  "O  just  God  !"  he  exclaimed,  "what  new  farre- 
fetched  and  unheard-of  pretense  is  this  for  the  title  to  a  country  !  The  French 
King  may  have  as  good  a  pretense  to  all  those  countreys  that  drink  clarette  and 
brandy!" 


3 8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  danger  from  Canada,  the  Puritan  leaders  in  Massachusetts 
entertained  the  fear  that  his  plan  was  to  betray  their  province 
to  the  Catholics  of  New  France.  What  else  could  be  the  mean- 
ing of  his  insolent  reminder  that  "the  privileges  of  Englishmen 
would  not  follow  them  to  the  end  of  the  world !  "x 

The  Stuart  plan  of  a  consolidated  military  province  in 
America,  therefore,  failed  at  just  the  moment  when  it  was  most 
needed.  The  plan  was  not  renewed  when  William  of  Orange's 
accession  to  the  throne  relieved  both  the  mother  country  and 
the  colonies  of  the  fear  of  a  Catholic  and  absolutist  reaction. 
For,  in  the  first  place,  William,  involved  in  a  tremendous 
struggle  with  Louis  XIV  on  the  Continent,  had  to  divert  his 
attention  for  a  while  from  the  colonies;  and,  in  the  second 
place,  as  the  Whig  champion  of  parliamentary  rule,  he  could 
hardly  with  good  grace  confiscate  colonial  charters  and  sup- 
press colonial  assemblies.  A  compromise  was  therefore  reached. 
Connecticut  and  Rhode  Island  were  allowed  to  resume  govern- 
ment under  their  old  charters,  and  Massachusetts  received  a 
new  one,  providing  for  a  royal  governor.  New  York  was  given 
an  assembly.  Governors  no  longer  brought  royal  troops  with 
them  to  their  provinces,  as  Andros  had  done,  but,  at  the  same 
time,  instructions  to  royal  officials  in  America  to  maintain  the 
prerogatives  of  the  crown  began  to  grow  long  and  explicit, 
and  the  Navigation  Act  of  1696  (see  page  29)  placed  in 
the  colonies  a  number  of  collectors,  naval  officers,  surveyors, 
and  admiralty  judges — the  first  considerable  body  of  English 
officials  in  America. 

In  the  generation  immediately  following  the  expulsion  of 
the  Stuarts  there  were  many  measures  taken  by  the  crown  for 
tightening  royal  control  in  the  colonies  without  invading  char- 
tered rights  or  traditional  liberties.  The  royal  veto  was  freely 

1  The  "Gentlemen,  Merchants  and  Inhabitants  of  Boston"  declared  in  a  mani- 
festo of  April  18,  1689,  "We  have  seized  upon  these  few  ill  men  which  have  been 
(next  to  our  sins)  the  grand  authors  of  our  misery  .  .  .  lest  ere  we  are  aware 
we  find  ourselves  to  be  given  away  to  a  Forreign  Power."  So  also  Jacob  Leisler 
seized  power  in  New  York  in  1689  to  prevent  the  province  from  being  betrayed 
to  the  French  by  the  governor's  councilors,  whom  he  calls  "Popishly  affected 
Dogs  and  Rogues." 


Longitude         81°   West      from     77°   Greenwich     I        Longitude         81°  West        from    77°    Greenwich 


DRIFT  TOWARD  ROYAL  CONTROL  IN  THE  COLONIES,   1682-1752 


40  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

exercised  over  acts  of  the  colonial  legislatures  (though  it  was 
abandoned  over  acts  of  Parliament  in  1707) ;  right  of  appeal 
to  the  king's  Privy  Council  was  extended  to  private  individuals 
in  the  colonies ;  Parliament  passed  laws  establishing  a  colonial 
post  office  and  regulating  colonial  currency ;  the  same  man  was 
often  made  governor  over  two  or  more  colonies;  and,  finally, 
the  crown  was  prompt  to  convert  the  proprietary  provinces 
into  the  royal  type  on  the  least  provocation.  The  Jerseys  were 
taken  under  royal  control  in  1702,  and  the  rights  of  the  Carolina 
proprietors  were  purchased  by  the  crown  in  1729.  Even 
Pennsylvania  and  Maryland  did  not  escape  passing  under  royal 
control  for  a  brief  season.  The  Tories  in  England,  supported 
by  the  Anglicans  in  the  colonies,  urged  that  the  king  confiscate 
all  the  American  charters  and  make  an  end  of  Quakers, 
Puritans,  and  Independents  in  the  colonies.  Bills  introduced 
into  Parliament  for  this  purpose  in  1701,  1706,  1715,  and  1722 
were  defeated  by  the  Whigs.  Yet  the  process  went  far.  In 
1682  Virginia  and  New  Hampshire  were  the  only  royal  colonies 
on  the  mainland  of  America.  Fifty  years  later  the  New  England 
colonies  of  Connecticut  and  Rhode  Island  and  the  proprietary 
provinces  of  Penn  and  Baltimore  were  the  only  ones  not  under 
direct  royal  government. 

The  whole  burden  of  American  history  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury is  the  demonstration  of  the  unworkable  character  of  this 
compromise  in  colonial  government  arrived  at  by  the  victorious 
Whigs  of  the  English  Revolution.  The  machinery  of  it  creaked 
in  every  joint.  It  was  inconsistent  to  overthrow  Stuart  pre- 
tensions in  England  and  maintain  them  in  the  colonies  by  re- 
fusing to  extend  the  Bill  of  Rights  and  Habeas  Corpus  to 
Englishmen  across  the  Atlantic.  It  was  foolish,  when  insist- 
ing on  the  subjection  of  the  executive  to  the  legislature  in 
England,  to  think  that  the  colonists  (who  had  taken  their  part 
too  in  the  Revolution)  would  gracefully  submit  to  an  increasing 
domination  by  executive  officials  appointed  by  the  crown.  It 
was  inconsistent  to  insist  on  the  royal  veto  in  the  colonies  just  at 
the  moment  when  it  was  dropped  in  England,  and  to  demand  a 
share  in  financial  legislation  for  the  king's  appointed  councils  in 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  41 

America  while  at  home  the  Commons  alone  held  the  purse 
strings  with  a  jealous  tenacity.  Finally,  it  was  a  mockery  to 
leave'the  assemblies  standing  in  the  colonies  and  yet  expect  them 
to  abandon  their  functions  by  accepting  the  king's  instructions 
to  royal  governors  as  the  law  of  the  land.  Benjamin  Franklin 
reports  that  the  president  of  the  Privy  Council  told  him  baldly 
in  1757  that  "the  king  is  the  legislative  of  the  colonies." 

We  have  long  been  accustomed  to  lay  the  blame  for  the 
American  Revolution  on  the  stubbornness  and  stupidity  of 
George  III  and  his  Tory  ministers  during  the  fifteen  years  pre- 
ceding the  outbreak  of  the  war — and  they  deserve  their  full 
share  of  blame.  At  the  same  time,  however,  we  must  remember 
the  failure  of  the  Whig  lords  during  their  long  tenure  of  power 
in  the  eighteenth  century  (1714-1760)  to  extend  the  prin- 
ciples and  privileges  of  the  great  English  Revolution  of  1689 
to  the  colonies.  The  English  Revolution  was  a  turning-point  in 
colonial  history.  It  was  the  auspicious  moment  for  the  estab- 
lishment of  a  federation  between  the  colonies  and  the  mother 
country,  based  on  mutual  confidence  and  the  enjoyment  of  the 
same  fundamental  rights.  The  opportunity  was  lost,  and,  what 
is  worse,  from  that  time  down  to  the  American  Revolution  there 
seems  to  have  been  but  a  single  important  British  official  having 
to  do  with  colonial  affairs  who  realized  that  an  opportunity  had 
been  lost  and  labored  to  redeem  it — the  incomparable  William 
Pitt.  That  Pitt's  suggestions  for  conciliation  were  scornfully 
rejected  by  the  English  government  as  "falling  in  with  the 
ideas  of  America  in  almost  every  particular"  is  a  sufficient  com- 
mentary on  the  disastrous  policy  of  alienation  of  the  American 
colonies  entered  upon  by  the  victorious  Whig  aristocracy  two 
generations  before  the  Stamp  Act  and  the  Boston  Tea  Party. 

Nowhere  were  the  defects  of  this  policy  more  conspicuous 
than  in  the  strained  relations  between  the  colonial  assemblies 
and  the  royal  governors.  The  governors  were  instructed  to 
maintain  the  prerogative  of  the  crown  undiminished,  as  in  the 
Stuart  period ;  while  the  assemblies,  seeing  the  king  limited  by 
his  Parliament  in  England,  thought  it  only  a  fair  conclusion 
that  the  king's  servants  should  be  limited  by  his  legislature  in 


42  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  colonies.  If  Parliament  was  the  guardian  of  the  liberties 
of  England,  no  less  were  the  colonial  assemblies  the  guardians 
of  the  liberties  of  America.  The  colonies,  growing  rapidly  in 
numbers  and  wealth,1  chafed  under  the  galling  yoke  that  was 
intended  to  keep  them  in  "a  limited  economic  freedom  and  a 
subordinate  political  status."  They  thought  they  should  have 
done  hearing  the  language  of  Andros,  that  they  "were  either 
subjects  or  rebels."  They  were  English  freemen,  protected 
in  their  rights  by  royal  charters  and  beholden  only  to  them- 
selves and  to  their  fathers  for  their  planting  and  growth  in  the 
New  World.2  Their  spokesmen,  then,  in  their  elected  assemblies 
held  the  royal  governors  in  check  at  every  point.  In  Massa- 
chusetts the  assembly  refused  to  vote  the  governor  a  permanent 
salary,  but  made  him  yearly  or  half-yearly  grants.  In  New 
York  governor  and  assembly  clashed  on  the  right  of  royal  ap- 
pointees to  interfere  with  the  levy  of  taxes  and  the  sessions  of 
the  legislature.  In  New  England  and  South  Carolina  they 
wrangled  over  coast  defenses*  in  Pennsylvania,  over  the  ex- 
emption of  the  proprietor's  lands  from  taxation ;  in  Maryland, 
over  the  collection  of  quitrents ;  in  the  Jerseys,  over  the  author- 
ity of  the  royal  judges ;  in  almost  every  colony,  over  the  issue 
of  paper  money  and  the  enforcement  of  the  Acts  of  Trade.  It 
seemed  not  only  to  the  vexed  governors  themselves  but  to 
disinterested  observers  as  well  that  the  colonies  regarded  them- 
selves as  little  free  states.  "The  New  York  assembly,"  wrote 
Peter  Kalm,  a  visitor  from  Sweden,  in  1750,  "may  be  looked 
upon  as  a  Parliament  or  a  Diet  in  miniature."  Four  years  later 
the  Privy  Council  complained  of  the  same  body  to  King 

*The  225,000  colonists  of  1689  had  grown  to  1,500,000  by  1760.  Their  exports 
in  the  same  period  increased  from  £390,000  to  £1,763,000.  They  imported  in  1760 
merchandise  from  England  alone  to  the  value  of  £2,000,000.  Down  to  the  Han- 
overian succession  (1714)  British  trade  with  the  West  Indies  was  more  important 
than  that  with  the  mainland,  but  by  1760  the  exports  from  England  to  North 
America  were  more  than  double  those  to  the  West  Indies.  Instructive  tables  are 
printed  in  Channing's  "History  of  the  United  States,"  Vol.  II,  pp.  524-526. 

2  It  was  not  till  the  surrender  of  the  colony  of  Georgia  to  the  crown  in  1752 
that  Parliament  made  any  grant  of  money  for  administration  in  America.  Great 
Britain  expected  every  colony  to  stand  on  its  own  feet. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  43 

George  II,  that  they  "had  taken  to  themselves  not  only  the 
management  and  disposal  of  the  public  money,  but  also  wrested 
from  your  Majesty's  governor  the  nomination  of  all  officers  of 
government,  the  custody  and  direction  of  all  military  stores, 
the  mustering  and  regulating  of  the  troops  raised  for  your 
Majesty's  service,  and  in  short  almost  every  other  executive 
part  of  government."  The  "independency"  which  Massachu- 
setts had  shown  under  the  Stuart  kings  was  infectious.  "The 
example  and  spirit  of  the  Boston  people,"  wrote  Governor 
Cosby  of  New  York,  in  1734,  "begins  to  spread  among  these 
colonies  in  a  most  prodigious  manner." 

The  situation  was  the  more  trying  for  the  governors  because 
they  could  not  rely  for  support  on  the  home  government.  In 
fact,  they  hardly  knew  to  whom  to  look  for  such  support. 
In  the  Stuart  period  the  royal  governor  was  the  king's  servant 
alone,  knowing  where  to  carry  his  complaints  and  whence  to 
take  his  orders.  But  after  1689  there  was  great  confusion  in 
colonial  administration.  Parliament,  the  Privy  Council,  and 
the  Board  of  Trade  all  took  a  hand  in  it,  each  rebuking  the 
other  for  trespassing  on  its  field,  but  none  assuming  the  con- 
tinuous and  enlightened  responsibility  necessary  for  the  build- 
ing of  a  stable  colonial  empire. 

Moreover,  the  duty  laid  upon  them  to  enforce  the  unpopu- 
lar Navigation  Acts  still  further  embarrassed  the  colonial 
governors.  The  act  of  1696  bound  them  by  oath  to  secure 
obedience  to  the  laws,  under  pain  of  a  fine  of  £1000,  but  at  the 
same  time  gave  them  no  adequate  weapons  of  enforcement.  It 
would  have  taken  a  fleet  of  warships  on  the  coast  and  a  regi- 
ment of  redcoats  in  every  colony  to  enforce  the  acts.  James 
Otis,  at  the  close  of  the  period,  said  that  "if  the  King  of  Eng- 
land were  encamped  on  Boston  Common  with  20,000  men,  he 
could  not  execute  these  laws."  The  great  merchants,  like  John 
Hancock  and  Peter  Faneuil,  throve  on  illicit  trade.  As  early 
as  1721  a  Boston  trader  named  Amory  wrote,  "If  you  have  a 
captain  you  can  confide  in,  you  will  find  it  easy  to  import  all 
kinds  of  goods  from  the  Streights,  France,  and  Spain,  although 
prohibited." 


44  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

It  became  more  and  more  evident,  as  the  population  and 
wealth  of  the  colonies  increased,  that  the  attempt  to  treat  them 
solely  as  a  nation  of  customers  of  Great  Britain  was  a  stupid 
piece  of  business.  The  mother  country  no  longer  furnished  a 
sufficient  market  for  their  tobacco  and  other  "  enumerated 
commodities/'1  while  the  liberty  to  carry  the  rest  of  their 
products  where  they  would  was  small  comfort  when  the  return 
cargo  had  to  be  carried  to  an  English  port  for  inspection  and 
perhaps  taxation.  Only  one  important  addition  was  made  to 
the  Navigation  Acts  in  the  eighteenth  century,  to  be  sure,  but 
that  one  was  the  most  damaging  of  them  all.  It  was  the  famous 
Sugar  and  Molasses  Act  of  1733,  which,  in  order  to  protect 
the  plantation-owners  in  the  British  West  Indies,  imposed  the 
prohibitive  duties  of  gd.  a  gallon  on  rum,  6d.  a  gallon  on 
molasses,  and  55.  a  hundredweight  on  sugar  imported  into 
the  American  colonies  from  the  Spanish,  French,  and  Dutch 
islands.  As  the  British  West  Indies  could  not  begin  to  furnish 
either  the  amount  of  molasses  required  for  the  distilleries  of 
New  England,  or  the  market  to  take  the  flour,  fish,  lumber,  and 
wheat  exported  from  the  mainland,  the  act  of  1733,  if  enforced, 
would  have  utterly  ruined  the  trade  of  New  England  and  the 
middle  colonies. 

Thus  political  custom  and  commercial  interests  in  the  col- 
onies both  ran  counter  to  the  British  policy  of  uniformity  in 
control  just  when  that  policy  seemed  most  necessary  for  the 
frustration  of  the  French  designs.  "His  Majesty  has  subjects 
enough  in  America,"  wrote  the  Board  of  Trade  in  1696,  "to 
drive  out  the  French  from  Canada,  but  they  are  so  crumbled 
into  little  governments  and  so  disunited  that  they  have  hitherto 

1  Molasses  and  rice  had  been  put  on  the  list  of  enumerated  goods  in  1705, 
and  later  (1722)  naval  stores,  copper,  beaver,  and  furs  were  added.  The  pro- 
duction of  tobacco  had  so  increased  by  the  year  1700  that  about  two  thirds  of 
the  crop  sent  to  England  from  Virginia  and  Maryland  was  reexported  to  the  con- 
tinent of  Europe,  with  a  rebate  to  the  colonists  of  75  per  cent  of  the  duties.  But 
even  with  this  rebate,  the  rehandling  of  the  cargo,  the  warehousing,  and  the  double 
freight  charges  made  it  impossible  for  the  cheaper  grades  of  American  tobacco 
(if  sent  lawfully  via  England)  to  compete  with  the  European  product.  American 
tobacco  was  often  burned  at  the  English  docks  as  a  drug  on  the  market. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  45 

afforded  but  little  assistance  to  each  other,  and  now  seem  in 
a  much  worse  disposition  to  do  it  for  the  future."  The  gover- 
nors took  the  imperial  view  of  the  case:  all  minor  matters, 
like  budgets,  taxes,  appeals,  should  yield  to  the  supreme  duty 
of  guarding  the  British  Empire  in  America  against  the  en- 
croachments of  the  French.  But  the  assemblies  insisted  first 
and  foremost  on  their  privileges  as  English  freemen.  Where 
they  were  most  uncompromisingly  true  to  English  tradition, 
there  they  seemed  most  disloyal  to  England's  interests  in 
America.  "Such  a  wrong-headed  people  I  thank  God  I  have 
never  had  to  deal  with  before,"  exclaimed  Governor  Dinwiddie 
to  the  Virginia  Burgesses.  He  found  them  " obstinate,  self- 
conceited,  and  in  too  much  of  a  republican  way  of  thinking." 
It  was  reported  that  the  Pennsylvania  assembly  told  their 
governor  in  plain  terms  that  they  "had  rather  the  French 
should  conquer  them  than  give  up  their  privileges." 

The  governors  of  New  France  were  plagued  by  no  such 
trials.  Their  colonists  were  few,  but  their  authority  was  un- 
questioned. Canada  since  1663  was  a  unified  royal  province, 
ruled  by  the  king's  governor  from  his  rock-citadel  at  Quebec. 
Louis  XIV  did  not  parley  with  his  subjects  in  America:  he 
commanded  them.  Charles  of  England  sent  a  civil  commission 
to  New  York  and  New  England  in  1664  to  investigate  alleged 
breaches  of  his  authority;  but  Louis  of  France  at  the  same 
moment  sent  to  Canada  the  crack  Carignan-Sallieres  regiment 
of  a  thousand  men.  The  English  governors  had  permanent 
provincial  assemblies  to  deal  with,  but  the  French  court  would 
not  even  let  the  Estates  of  Canada  gather  in  the  cathedral  at 
Quebec  to  grace  the  governor's  inauguration  (1672).  This 
same  governor,  Frontenac;  was  warned  by  the  great  minister 
Colbert  "never  to  give  corporate  form  to  the  inhabitants  of 
Canada."  It  was  not  alone  two  races,  then,  or  two  territorial 
rivals  that  clashed  in  the  mighty  conflict  between  France  and 
England  for  the  North  American  continent.  It  was  two  ideals 
of  government:  on  the  one  side,  a  paternal  absolutism  sup- 
ported by  military  force;  on  the  other,  a  jealous  tenacity  of 
individual  rights  five  centuries  old. 


46  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

So  long  as  the  Stuarts  ruled  in  England,  their  governors  in 
America,  even  though  chafing  (like  Dongan  and  Andros)  under 
the  threats  of  the  French  and  the  Indians,  were  obliged  to 
preserve  an  appearance  of  civility  in  dealing  with  the  servants 
of  the  "good  royal  cousin"  at  Versailles,  who  furnished  money 
to  Charles  and  James  to  enable  them  to  dispense  with  an 
inquisitive  Parliament.  The  accession  of  William  of  Orange 
cleared  the  air.  France  and  England  became  open  foes  and 
grappled  in  the  first  battles  of  a  struggle  of  a  century  and  a 
quarter,  which  was  to  determine  the  mastery  of  the  seas,  the 
primacy  of  commercial  power,  and  the  scepter  of  empire.1 
The  fight  for  colonial  supremacy  in  America  was  but  one  act 
in  the  drama.  The  names  of  Louisburg,  Ticonderoga,  Pitts- 
burgh, and  Quebec  stand  engraved  on  the  same  tablets  with 
La  Hogue,  Blenheim,  Dettingen,  and  Plassey,  to  commemorate 
the  triumph  of  British  Imperialism. 

Until  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  war  in 
America  was  sporadic  and  unorganized.  Indian  raids  on  the 
border  settlements  of  New  England  and  New  York,  accom- 
panied by  the  horrors  of  massacre  at  Schenectady  (1690), 
Deerfield  (1704),  and  Haverhill  (1708),  filled  the  colonies 
with  dismay,  but  failed  to  unite  them  in  defense.  They  were, 
says  Governor  Fletcher  of  New  York  (1693),  "as  much  divided 
as  Christian  and  Turk."  Ambitious  counterexpeditions  of  the 
English  against  Quebec  were  wrecked  on  the  divided  counsels 
of  the  colonies  (1690)  or  on  the  rocks  of  the  St.  Lawrence 
(1711).  The  merchants  and  planters  of  the  Atlantic  coast, 
far  from  the  scenes  of  frontier  massacres  and  absorbed  in  their 
trade  with  Europe  and  the  Indies,  were  indifferent  to  their 
governors'  pleas  for  defense.  They  even  spoke  of  the  regiments 
which  England  sent  over  to  protect  them  as  "alien  garrisons." 
Although  the  English  outnumbered  the  French  in  America 

!In  the  one  hundred  and  twenty-six  years  from  the  accession  of  William  of 
Orange  to  the  overthrow  of  Napoleon  (1815)  England  and  France  fought  seven 
wars,  filling  fifty-seven  years,  during  which  France  lost  her  colonial  empire  and 
her  dictatorial  position  in  European  cabinets.  England  emerged  the  strongest 
of  the  Old  World  nations. 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  47 

sixteen  to  one  (1,300,000  to  80,000)  they  had  not,  after  two 
generations  of  covert  or  open  hostility,  gained  a  single  point 
of  vantage.  Intercolonial  conferences  were  called,  but  not 
attended.  Plans  of  union  were  proposed,  but  not  accepted. 
It  would  be  impossible  to  imagine  a  more  dilapidated  state  of 
public  opinion  than  that  in  which  the  English  colonies  faced 
what  proved  to  be  their  final  struggle  with  France. 

It  was  a  moment  fraught  with  tremendous  consequences  for 
the  future  of  America  when  a  young  major  of  militia  from 
Virginia,  just  come  of  age,  tall  and  straight,  with  a  command- 
ing steel-blue  eye  and  a  countenance  open  as  the  dawn,  was 
ushered  into  the  presence  of  the  officers  of  the  French  Fort  Le 
Bosuf  in  the  northwestern  corner  of  Pennsylvania.  The  envoy 
was  George  Washington,  and  the  message  that  he  brought  from 
Governor  Dinwiddie  of  Virginia  was  a  warning  to  the  French 
to  keep  off  the  land  "so  notoriously  known  to  be  the  property 
of  the  crown  of  Great  Britain."  Washington  was  courteously 
received  and  informed  that  his  message  would  be. transmitted 
to  the  governor  at  Quebec.  Then  he  set  out  on  his  perilous 
journey  through  the  wilderness  back  to  the  frontier  settlements, 
doubtless  turning  over  in  his  mind  the  boastful  oath  which  he 
had  heard  the  French  officers  at  Venango  swear  in  their  cups, 
that  their  design  was  to  take  possession  of  the  Ohio,  and  "by 
God !  we  will  do  it." 

The  possession  of  the  Ohio  was  the  bone  of  contention.  At 
almost  the  same  moment  French  and  English  expeditions 
moved  down  its  rich  valley — the  French  under  Celeron  de 
Bienville1  (1749)  nailing  signs  to  the  trees  and  sinking  leaden 
plates  under  the  river  banks  to  claim  the  land  for  Louis  XV, 
and  Christopher  Gist  (1750)  prospecting  for  the  new  Ohio  Com- 
pany (formed  by  Virginian  and  English  capitalists)  and  deter- 
mined "to  go  quite  down  to  the  Mississippi  rather  than  take 
mean  and  broken  land."  The  Indians  along  the  river  banks 
listened  in  turn  to  the  blandishments  of  the  French  and  the 
threats  of  the  English,  drank  their  brandy  and  rum  and  ac- 
cepted their  gifts  of  wampum  with  impartial  stolidity,  little 

1  Some  scholars  spell  this  name  Blainville. 


48  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

dreaming  that  they  were  the  dusky  chorus  in  the  opening 
of  a  tragedy  of  war  that  was  to  be  played  on  the  stage  of 
three  continents. 

The  first  two  years  of  the  war  brought  only  disaster  to  Eng- 
lish arms.  It  seemed  as  though  the  punishment  of  half  a 
century  of  incompetence  and  wrangling,  of  divided  councils 
and  dissipated  resources,  were  being  visited  on  the  colonies. 
Expeditions  planned  in  boastful  leisure  were  abandoned  in 
panic.  Neglected  garrisons  were  exposed  to  massacre  at  the 
hands  of  the  uncontrollable  savage  allies  of  the  French.  Rival- 
ries and  insubordination  were  rife.  Governors  and  assemblies, 
king's  troops  and  provincial  levies,  were  all  trying  to  shift  to 
the  other's  shoulders  the  blame  for  the  disasters.  A  royal 
order  of  May,  1756,  reduced  all  the  higher  colonial  officers  to 
the  rank  of  captain  when  they  were  serving  in  the  same  army 
with  officers  of  the  king's  commission,  and  the  American  sol- 
diers, though  they  often  saved  the  day  by  their  rude  efficiency, 
had  to  hear  themselves  called  "greenhorns,"  "ragamuffins,"  and 
"rabble"  by  the  trained  but  incompetent  commanders  who  were 
sent  over  to  lead  them.  Braddock's  defeat  (1755)  exposed  the 
frontiers  of  Pennsylvania,  Maryland,  and  Virginia  to  the  fury 
of  the  Indians  along  a  line  of  three  hundred  and  fifty  miles, 
which  the  heroic  Washington,  with  only  1500  ill-equipped  and 
ill-assorted  troops,  labored  in  anguish  of  soul  to  defend.1 

1We  hear  already  from  the  young  colonel  of  twenty-five  the  language  of 
bitter  disillusionment  which  was  to  be  so  often  in  his  mouth  during  the  dark 
days  of  the  American  Revolution  and  the  trying  days  of  his  presidency.  He 
laments  the  hour  that  gave  him  a  commission,  and  would  "at  any  other  time 
than  this  of  imminent  danger  resign  without  one  hesitating  moment  a  com- 
mand" from  which  he  never  expects  "to  reap  honor  or  benefit,  while  the  murder 
of  helpless  families  may  be  laid  to  [his]  account."  How  serious  the  situation 
was,  with  the  frontier  from  the  Hudson  to  the  James  guarded  by  only  thirty- 
five  blockhouses,  can  be  judged  from  a  letter  of  a  French  captain  written  home 
in  July,  1756:  "We  are  making  here  a  place  that  history  will  not  forget.  The 
English  colonies  have  ten  times  more  people  than  ours,  but  these  wretches  have 
not  the  least  knowledge  of  war.  .  .  .  Not  a  week  passes  but  the  French  send 
them  a  band  of  'hair-dressers'  whom  they  would  be  very  glad  to  dispense  with. 
It  is  incredible  what  a  quantity  of  scalps  they  bring  us.  In  Virginia  they  have 
committed  unheard-of  cruelties,  carried  off  families,  burned  a  great  many 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  49 

Every  effort  for  union  among  the  colonies  since  the  beginning 
of  the  French  wars  (1690)  had  come  to  naught  through  mutual 
mistrust.  The  last  such  attempt  was  the  Albany  Congress  of 
June,  1754,  .where,  in  the  very  days  when  Washington  was 
fighting  for  the  control  of  the  Ohio,  the  assembled  delegates 
from  the  New  England  colonies,  Pennsylvania,  Maryland,  and 
New  York,  including  some  of  the  most  distinguished  persons 
in  America,  had  to  listen  to  very  plain  and  unpalatable  truths 
from  the  old  Mohawk  chief  Hendrick:  "Look  about  your 
country  and  see ;  you  have  no  fortifications,  no,  not  even  in  this 
town.  It  is  but  a  step  from  Canada  hither,  and  the  French  may 
come  and  turn  you  out  of  doors.  You  desire  us  to  speak  from 
the  bottom  of  our  heart  and  we  will  do  it.  Look  at  the  French : 
they  are  men.  They  are  fortifying  everywhere.  But  you  are 
like  women,  bare  and  open,  without  fortifications."  After  two 
years  of  uninterrupted  disaster  the  elegant  Lord  Chesterfield 
confirmed  the  words  of  the  old  Indian  chieftain :  "  We  are  un- 
done both  at  home  and  abroad — at  home  by  our  increasing  debt 
and  expenses,  abroad  by  our  ill-luck  and  incapacity.  We  are 
no  longer  a  nation ! " 

Then  fortune  changed  overnight.  A  man  came  to  the  helm 
of  the  British  government  for  the  first  time  within  the  memory 
of  a  generation — a  man  incorruptible  among  a  gang  of  thieves, 
far-visioned  amid  a  crowd  of  opportunists,  energetic,  confident, 
generous,  resourceful  in  a  public  service  on  which  the  blight  of 
fear  and  irresolution  had  settled.  William  Pitt  appealed  from 
the  narrow  Whig  aristocracy,  which  had  controlled  Parliament 
and  king  for  nearly  half  a  century,  to  the  British  nation  at  large. 
He  called  Scotchmen  and  Americans  to  the  privilege  of  partner- 
ship in  the  empire  and  accorded  them  the  confidence  of  partners. 
He  turned  the  war  in  both  hemispheres  from  a  feeble  and  timor- 
ous defensive  into  a  bold  and  planful  attack  all  along  the  line. 
Defying  the  claims  of  birth  and  the  clamor  of  placemen,  he 
chose  his  generals  and  admirals  for  valor  and  counsel  alone. 

houses,  and  killed  an  infinity  of  people.  These  miserable  English  are  in  the 
extremity  of  distress,  and  repent  too  late  of  the  unjust  war  they  began  against 
us."  (Quoted  in  Parkman's  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe,"  Vol.  I,  p.  392.) 


50  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA     . 

A  new  tone  pervaded  the  dispatches  to  America.  The  governors 
of  the  crown  were  asked  to  win  their  assemblies  and  not  to  bully 
them.  The  odious  order  of  May,  1756,  was  revoked  and 
colonial  officers  took  rank  with  the  king's  own.  On  the  morn- 
ing that  the  new  order  was  read  to  the  General  Court  at  Boston 
the  colony  of  Massachusetts  voted  the  entire  number  of  men 
that  had  been  asked  for  from  all  New  England.  The  American 
colonies  as  a  whole  increased  their  contingents  fivefold.  Massa- 
chusetts voted  £172,000  for  the  war  in  the  first  two  months  of 
1758,  although  her  farming  and  fishing  population  was  already 
burdened  with  heavy  taxes.  New  Hampshire  sent  one  out  of 
three  of  her  able-bodied  men  to  the  field  of  battle.  Under  able 
and  intrepid  commanders  like  Amherst,  Wolfe,  Howe,  and 
Forbes,  the  British  attack  was  delivered  all  along  the  line  from 
the  grim  fortress  of  Louisburg,  which  guarded  the  entrance  of 
the  St.  Lawrence,  to  Fort  Duquesne,  at  the  forks  of  the  Ohio. 
Louisburg  surrendered  to  Amherst  in  July,  1758.  In 
November  General  Forbes  drove  the  French  from  Fort 
Duquesne  and  rebuilt  the  shattered  walls  under  the  name  of 
Fort  Pitt.  The  next  May,  Bourlamaque  withdrew  from  Crown 
Point  and  Ticonderoga,  opening  to  the  English  the  lake  whose 
sapphire  surface  stretched  like  a  broad  pavement  down  to  the 
St.  Lawrence  valley  and  the  outposts  of  Montreal.  The  sur- 
render of  Niagara  to  Amherst,  in  July,  cut  off  the  interior  lake 
posts  of  the  French  (Detroit,  Mackinac,  St.  Joseph,  Sault  Ste. 
Marie)  and  compelled  them  to  abandon  the  forts  of  the  upper 
Ohio  valley  (Presqu'ile,  Venango,  Le  Boeuf),  flanked  as  they 
were  by  the  English  at  Niagara  and  Fort  Pitt.  The  crowning  ex- 
ploit of  the  war  came  in  September,  1759,  when  Wolfe,  after 
lying  nearly  three  months  with  his  fleet  in  the  St.  Lawrence 
before  the  impregnable  rock  of  Quebec,  conceived  and  executed 
the  daring  plan  which  set  out  his  army  in  the  early  morning 
mists  in  battle  array  on  the  Plains  of  Abraham  and  opened  the 
gates  of  the  city  to  the  brave  soldiers  whose  shouts  of  triumph 
fell  on  his  dying  ear.  The  capture  of  Quebec  was  the  brightest 
jewel  in  the  crown  of  the  wonderful  year  of  1759,  the  "year  of 
victory,"  when  French  arms  were  defeated  at  Minden  beyond 


THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND  51 

the  Rhine  and  French  fleets  destroyed  at  Quiberon  on  the  coast 
of  Brittany  and  driven  from  Pondicherry  on  the  coast  of  India. 
That  year  was  the  imperishable  tribute  to  the  genius  of  William 
Pitt.  England's  sorrow  was  changed  to  joy.  "The  bells  of 
London  ring  out  for  a  new  victory  every  morning,"  cried  Horace 
Walpole.  The  gloomy  prediction  of  Chesterfield,  made  two  years 
earlier,  was  fulfilled,  but  little  as  he  had  dreamed.  England 
was,  indeed,  "no  longer  a  nation" — she  was  a  world  empire. 

On  September  8, 1760,  after  the  fall  of  Montreal,  the  governor 
of  New  France,  the  Marquis  de  Vaudreuil,  signed  the  capitu- 
lation by  which  Canada  with  all  its  dependencies  was  trans- 
ferred to  the  British  crown.  On  October  24,  1760,  George  III 
came  to  the  English  throne.  The  new  king  wished  to  rule  as 
well  as  to  reign.  He  was  a  politician  enamored  of  his  own  po- 
litical sagacity.  He  was  a  high  Tory  and  surrounded  himself 
with  Tory  henchmen.  They  plotted  against  the  great  minister, 
and  in  October,  1761,  William  Pitt  resigned  the  seals.  It  was 
of  momentous  consequence  to  the  American  colonies  that  the 
great  statesman  who  is  ranked  with  Washington  as  a  builder  of 
our  nation  fell  from  power  at  just  the  moment  when  the  French 
were  driven  from  this  continent.  For  Pitt  looked  on  the  colonies 
as  more  than  an  auxiliary  of  England  for  the  humiliation  of 
France.  He  wished  to  see  them  bound  in  a  close  federation 
with  each  other  and  with  the  motherland,  proud  of  their  place 
in  the  empire,  their  local  loyalties  not  lost  but  fortified  in  their 
larger  loyalty  to  Britain.  Conciliation,  not  coercion,  was  his 
watchword.  He  was,  in  the  phrase  of  Hubert  Hall,  "the  first 
high  almoner  of  statecraft  to  cast  his  bread  on  distant  waters." 
And  had  he  maintained  his  tenure  of  power  unbroken  for  a  score 
of  years,  as  Walpole  had  before  him,  he  might  have  made  the 
bonds  between  the  men  of  English  race  on  both  sides  of  the 
Atlantic  strong  and  elastic  enough  to  meet  generations  of 
economic  growth  or  political  tension. 

However,  it  is  probable  that  even  William  Pitt,  with  all  his 
tact  and  conciliatoriness,  could  not  have  prevented  the  eventual 
separation  of  the  American  colonies  from  England.  For  the 
colonies  during  the  eighteenth  century  were  diverging  more  and 


52  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

more  from  the  motherland.  Though  their  population  was  still 
chiefly  of  English  stock,  nevertheless,  by  incorporating  the 
Dutch  of  the  Netherlands  and  absorbing  large  numbers  of 
French,  Germans,  and  Scotch-Irish,  they  had  introduced  ele- 
ments of  population  indifferent  if  not  hostile  to  English  institu- 
tions. The  presence  of  several  hundred  thousand  negro  slaves 
still  further  complicated  the  social  question.  In  political  de- 
velopment too  the  colonies  had  tended  to  grow  away  from  the 
mother  country.  The  concentration  of  power  in  the  hands  of 
Parliament,  conducted  by  a  ministry  or  cabinet,  was  opposed  to 
the  colonial  emphasis  on  local  authorities  in  assembly,  vestry, 
or  town  meeting ;  while  the  executive  power  in  almost  all  of  the 
colonies  was  the  rival  and  not  the  agent  of  the  legislative. 
Finally,  as  we  have  already  seen,  the  commercial  policy  of  the 
Navigation  Acts  ran  counter  to  the  interests  of  America's  de- 
veloping trade  and  took  on  increasingly  the  aspect  of  exploita- 
tion. If  these  social,  political,  and  economic  differences  were 
to  be  harmonized  at  all,  it  would  have  to  be  through  the  exercise 
of  an  enlightened,  generous,  and  conciliatory  spirit. 

The  brief  period  of  William  Pitt's  ministry  looked  like  the 
dawn  of  such  a  promise.  The  colonies  seemed  fused  by  the  fires 
of  a  victorious  patriotism  into  an  imperial  unity.  The  triumphs 
of  Amherst  and  Wolfe  were  hailed  with  grateful  joy  from  New 
Hampshire  to  Georgia.  The  governor  of  Massachusetts  pro- 
claimed a  day  of  thanksgiving,  and  the  preachers  vied  with  each 
other  in  sermons  of  extravagant  congratulation  over  the  down- 
fall of  New  France,  "the  North  American  Babylon,"  "the  seat 
of  Satan  and  Indian  idolatry."  But  in  the  midst  of  rejoicing 
there  were  ominous  signs  and  warnings.  Report  came  to 
America  of  the  fall  of  the  great  minister  and  the  abandonment 
of  his  policy.  The  new  young  king  was  in  the  hands  of  the 
Tories,  insistent  on  his  prerogative,  determined  to  have  obedi- 
ence to  the  letter  of  his  royal  orders.  Murmurs  against 
"arbitrary  acts"  of  Parliament  were  rising  in  Boston  and 
Williamsburg  in  the  very  days  in  which  the  terms  of  the  treaty 
with  France  were  being  promulgated,  and  wise  observers  were 
suggesting  that  it  might  be  better  for  England  to  keep  the  rich 


NORTH  AMERICA  AT  THE  CLOSE  OF  THE  FRENCH  WARS 


54  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

sugar  island  of  Guadeloupe  and  let  the  French  stay  in  Canada 
as  a  wholesome  check  on  the  " republican"  tendencies  of  the 
colonies.  "They  will  not  fail  to  shake  off  their  dependence," 
said  the  French  minister  Choiseul,  "the  moment  Canada  is 
ceded."  Canada  was  ceded,  however,  by  the  Treaty  of  Paris 
(1763),  and  the  English  flag  waved  over  the  North  American 
continent  from  Hudson's  Straits  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  The 
stage  was  cleared  for  the  opening  act  of  our  national  drama. 
"With  the  triumph  of  Wolfe  on  the  Heights  of  Abraham,"  says 
John  Richard  Green,  "began  the  history  of  the  United  States." 
In  the  prelude  of  a  Wagnerian  opera  we  hear  anticipating 
strains  and  fragments  of  the  various  themes  which  are  worked 
out  in  detail  in  the  course  of  the  tragic  drama.  Perhaps  it 
is  not  too  fanciful  to  see  in  the  colonial  period  of  our  history 
a  sort  of  prelude  to  the  drama  of  our  national  life.  Liberty, 
Democracy,  and  Union  are  the  ideals  for  which  successive  gen- 
erations have  wrought  and  fought  in  our  land — the  generations 
of  Washington,  of  Jackson,  and  of  Lincoln.  Already  these 
ideals  appear  as  "motifs"  in  our  colonial  history.  The  settlers 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  breaking  away  from  Old  World 
traditions,  brought  with  them  the  habit  of  freedom.  In  the 
increasing  claims  of  the  colonial  representative  assemblies  and 
in  their  resistance  to  political  and  commercial  control  by  the 
officers  o.f  the  crown  we  see  the  foreshadowing  of  American 
democracy.  And,  finally,  the  repeated  attempts  of  the  eight- 
eenth century  to  secure  union  in  the  face  of  the  foe  on  our 
borders  suggest  the  labors  of  Hamilton  and  Madison,  of  Web- 
ster and  Lincoln,  to  make  a  United  States  the  common  home 
of  our  liberty  and  our  democracy. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION 

The  decree  has  gone  forth  .  .  .  that  a  more  equal  liberty  than  has  prevailed 
in  other  parts  of  the  world  must  be  established  in  America. — JOHN  ADAMS 

BRITISH  PROVOCATION 

Two  facts  of  supreme  importance  summarize  the  colonial 
period  of  our  history:  England  established  an  empire  in 
America,  and  England  lost  an  empire  in  America.  The  first  of 
these  facts  we  have  studied  in  the  preceding  chapter.  We  turn 
now  to  the  second  fact,  the  separation  of  the  American  colonies 
from  England — an  event  which  Whitelaw  Reid,  former  ambas- 
sador to  the  court  of  St.  James,  spoke  of,  with  pardonable 
exaggeration,  as  the  "  greatest  event  in  modern  history." 

All  crises  in  history  are  the  adjustment,  often  with  the  ex- 
plosive violence  of  revolution,  of  forces  that  have  been  long 
in  preparation.  The  event  is  understood  only  in  the  causes 
of  the  event.  When  a  revolution  becomes  inevitable  it  means 
simply  that  certain  political,  economic,  or  religious  ideas  have 
developed  to  a  point  where,  in  order  to  find  their  expression, 
they  must  burst  asunder  a  political,  economic,  or  religious 
order  which  refuses  to  adapt  itself  to  their  accommodation. 
The  outbreak  of  revolution  is  not  the  beginning  but  the  cul- 
mination of  the  process.  So  it  was  with  the  American  Revo- 
lution. For  a  full  century  before  the  colonies  threw  off  their 
allegiance  to  England  independence  was  preparing.  "The  bot- 
tom of  all  the  disorders,"  wrote  Governor  Hutchinson  of 
Massachusetts,  "is  the.  opinion  that  every  colony  has  a  legis- 
lature in  itself,  the  acts  and  doings  of  which  are  not  to  be 
controlled  by  Parliament."  We  have  seen  the  colonies  peti- 
tioning, protesting,  evading,  threatening,  apologizing,  until  it 
seemed  as  if  their  connection  with  the  mother  country  must 

55 


56  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

be  worn  down  to  the  slender  thread  of  a  sentimental  attach- 
ment. Before  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century  they  ap- 
peared to  an  enlightened  traveler  from  Sweden  as  "likely  in 
thirty  or  fifty  years  to  form  a  state  by  themselves."1  They 
called  themselves  "  jurisdictions/'  and  in  the  midst  of  protesta- 
tions of  loyalty  virtually  defied  the  sovereignty  of  England. 
Had  the  officials  of  Charles  II  shown  half  the  zeal  in  enforcing 
his  orders  and  punishing  the  recalcitrant  "patriots"  of  Massa- 
chusetts that  George  III  showed  in  supporting  the  measures  of 
Grenville  and  Townshend,  the  issue  of  American  independence 
might  have  been  settled  an  even  century  before  the  battle 
of  Lexington. 

The  triumph  of  Wolfe  at  Quebec  brought  a  great  change  in 
the  relations  between  England  and  the  colonies.  For  England 
it  meant  the  sudden  acquisition  of  an  enormous  empire,  with 
the  national  debt  doubled  and  the  burdens  for  the  defense  of 
dominions  "on  which  the  sun  never  set"  multiplied  many  fold. 
For  America  it  meant  the  removal  of  the  French  danger  on 
the  north  and  of  the  Spanish  danger  on  the  south.  There  was 
no  longer  place  for  the  fear  so  naively  expressed  by  a  farmer 
of  customs  under  Charles  II  (1664),  that  if  the  colonies  did 
not  maintain  the  honor  and  reputation  of  his  Majesty  who 
protected  their  trade  and  navigation,  they  "would  be  subject 
to  be  devoured  by  strangers."  Long  before  the  expulsion  of 
the  French  from  America  astute  political  philosophers  like 
Montesquieu,  d'Argenson,  and  Turgot  had  remarked  on  the 
likelihood  that  the  colonies  would  eventually  separate  from 
England  as  the  ripe  fruit  falls  from  the  tree.  But  it  was  the 
conquest  of  Canada  that  removed,  with  "the  turbulent  Gal- 
licks,"  the  only  check  on  the  prophetic  destiny  of  America. 
On  hearing  of  the  Peace  of  Paris,  Vergennes,  the  French 
ambassador  at  Constantinople,  remarked  that  England  would 
repent  of  having  put  an  end  to  French'  rule  in  Canada.  "The 
colonies,"  he  said,  "stand  no  longer  in  need  of  England's  pro- 
tection. She  will  call  on  them  to  help  contribute  toward 

1  Peter  Kalm,  "Travels  in  North  America,"  Vol.  T,  p.  265. 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  57 

supporting  the  burden  they  have  helped  to  bring  on  her,  and 
they  will  answer  by  striking  off  all  dependence." 

The  cession  of  Canada,  however,  was  not  the  cause  of 
America's  rising.  That  cause  was  rather  a  change  of  behavior 
on  the  part  of  England  toward  the  colonies,  which  coincided 
with  and  was  partly  occasioned  by  the  cession  of  Canada. 
George  Grenville  became  prime  minister  two  months  after 
the  Treaty  of  Paris  was  signed  (Arjril,  1763).  He  it  was  who 
was  chiefly  responsible  for  the  introduction  of  a  new  policy 
in  Parliament;  namely,  taxing  the  American  colonies  for  the 
sake  of  raising  a  revenue.  Grenville  did  not  invent  the  idea. 
Many  times  during  the  eighteenth  century  English  officials 
at  home  and  in  America  had  suggested  such  a  measure,  but 
neither  Walpole  nor  Pitt  had  been  willing  to  sanction  it.1  That 
Grenville  did  so  was  due  partly  to  a  change  in  the  English 
government  with  the  accession  of  George  III  and  partly  to  a 
change  in  the  condition  of  the  British  Empire  after  the  Peace 
of  Paris. 

George  III  was  a  pedant.  He  was  neither  dull-witted  nor 
cruel-hearted,  but  opinionated  and  obstinate.  He  was  often 
called  a  tyrant  by  Patrick  Henry  and  other  ardent  American 
patriots,  but  he  was  rather  a  theorist  than  a  tyrant.  He  had 
" ideas"  on  kingship — and  they  were  a  hundred  years  behind 
the.  times.  He  was  an  indefatigable  politician,  but  the  results 
of  his  policy  were  always  compromised  by  his  serene  confi- 
dence in  his  own  sagacity.  He  had  no  genius  for  conciliation, 
resisting  concession  until  it  was  too  late  to  make  it  appear  as 
a  gracious  favor.  His  education  was  of  the  meanest  sort, 
acquired  in  the  early  surroundings  of  waiting-women's  flattery 
and  indulgent  chaperonage.  Vaulting  ambition  dwelt  in  his 
small  mind.  He  would  rule  his  realm  as  kings  of  old  had 
ruled.  He  demanded  ministers  loyal  to  the  kingly  prerogative 
above  all  else:  Butes  and  Grenvilles,  Graf  tons  and  Norths— 

*A  customs  officer  at  Boston  proposed  an  elaborate  plan  of  colonial  taxation 
in  1722,  with  stamp  duties,  land  tax,  excise  on  liquors,  import  duties,  etc.  When 
Walpole  was  urged  to  adopt  such  a  policy  he  replied  that  he  had  half  of  old  Eng- 
land against  him  and  that  he  didn't  care  to  add  the  enmity  of  the  new  England. 


58  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

obsequious,  sententious,  and  vain.  The  large  wisdom  of  Pitt, 
Burke,  or  Fox  appeared  to  him  as  only  factious  opposition 
encouraging  rebels  in  their  folly.  Descending  to  the  commonest 
levels  of  political  jobbery,  he  distributed  what  he  jocosely 
called  in  a  letter  to  Lord  North  his  "gold  pills"  to  secure  seats 
in  Parliament  for  men  who  would  blindly  follow  the  royal 
program  and  hoot  or  hiss  down  the  repeated  remonstrances 
of  real  statesmen.  "He  spent  a  long  life,"  says  the  English 
historian  Lecky,  "in  obstinately  resisting  measures  which  are 
now  almost  universally  admitted  to  be  good,  and  in  supporting 
measures  which  are  now  as  universally  admitted  to  have  been 
bad."  Thomas  Jefferson  was  not  wrong  when  he  attributed 
the  accumulated  grievances  which  led  the  American  colonies  to 
declare  their  independence  not  to  the  ministers,  the  Parliament, 
or  the  people  of  England,  but  to  King  George  III. 

Such  a  man  it  was  England's  ill  fortune  to  have  at  the  head 
of  the  state  at  one  of  the  most  critical  moments  of  her  his- 
tory. William  Pitt  had  created  an  empire  in  two  hemispheres. 
George  III  obliged  him  to  turn  it  over  to  himself.  Infinite 
tact  was  needed  to  integrate  the  parts  of  this  empire,  to  recon- 
cile habits  of  self-government  in  America  with  imperial  alle- 
giance, to  distribute  equally  the  burden  of  debt  and  defense, 
to  adopt  commercial  codes  for  the  benefit  of  a  trade  spread 
over  three  oceans.  But  George  III  and  his  obsequious  ministers 
proceeded  to -handle  the  empire  as  if  it  were  a  medieval  fief 
or  a  royal  demesne. 

The  plan  of  management  for  the  American  part  of  the  em- 
pire was  announced  by  Grenville  in  various  meetings  of  Par- 
liament in  the  autumn  of  1763  and  the  spring  of  1764.  It  was 
entirely  after  the  heart  of  the  king,  who  in  proroguing  Parlia- 
ment on  April  19,  1764,  spoke  enthusiastically  of  "the  wise 
regulations"  which  had  been  established  "to  augment  the 
public  revenues,  to  unite  the  interests  of  the  most  distant 
possessions  of  the  crown,  and  to  encourage  their  commerce 
with  Great  Britain."  That  is  just  what  the  measures  of  Gren- 
ville were  meant  to  do.  How  well  they  succeeded,  the  events  of 
another  nineteenth  of  April,  eleven  years  later,  tell.  It  was  a 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  $0 

threefold  scheme  that  Grenville  proposed :  ( i )  to  establish  a 
permanent  military  force  in  Arnerica ;  ( 2 )  to  stiffen  and  enforce 
the  Acts  of  Trade;  (3)  to  raise  a  revenue  in  America  by  parlia- 
mentary taxation.  " These  three  measures,"  says  Lecky,  "pro- 
duced the  American  Revolution."  They  were  regarded  by  the 
colonists  as  the  beginning  of  their  woes,  for  in  all  future  prot- 
estations their  cry  for  relief  was  for  a  return  to  the  state  of 
affairs  existing  before  the  Grenville  legislation.  Edmund  Burke 
said  that  prior  to  1764  the  attitude  of  the  colonies  was  "one  of 
acquiescence."1 

Grenville 's  measures  were  inspired  by  the  condition  of  the 
empire  immediately  following  the  triumph  over  the  French. 
An  immense  territory  had  been  added  to  the  British  crown 
and  a  double  burden  of  debt  to  the  British  exchequer.2  Quebec 
on  the  north,  and  East  and  West  Florida  on  the  south  (see  map, 
p.  53),  were  organized  into  royal  provinces,  but  under  absolute 
governors,  as  the  provinces  had  too  few  English  inhabitants  to 
furnish  assemblies.  The  great  tract  between  the  Alleghenies  and 
the  Mississippi  was  to  be  kept  for  a  while  under  control  of  the 
crown  as  unorganized  territory.  The  Indians  in  it  had  been 
transferred  by  the  Treaty  of  Paris  from  French  to  English 
allegiance,  but  that  did  not  hinder  the  French  from  fomenting 
attacks  by  the  Indians  on  their  new  masters.  In  the  mid- 
summer of  1763  the  formidable  Iroquois  chieftain  Pontiac 
roused  the  redskins  to  the  last  desperate  effort  to  recover  the 
lands  of  their  fathers  from  the  European  intruders.  He  cap- 
tured every  fort  between  the  Ohio  and  Lake  Erie  and  laid  siege 

alt  is  useless  to  seek  the  origin  of  the  American  Revolution  in  any  single 
event.  James  Otis  in  his  speech  at  Boston  on  the  Writs  of  Assistance,  in  1761, 
had  declared  that  any  act  that  violated  the  essential  rights  of  British  subjects 
was  void  ;  and  Patrick  Henry  in  his  famous  plea  in  tlie  Parsons'  Cause  at 
Williamsburg,  in  1763,  asserted  that  the  king  might  forfeit  his  subjects' 
obedience  by  breaking  his  part  of  the  contract  to  defend  their  liberties.  Henry 
even  spoke  the  word  "  tyrant "  and  heard  murmurs  of  "  treason  ! "  But  these 
were  local  quarrels,  whereas  Grenville's  measures  were  the  announcement  of  a 
general  colonial  policy— the  first  since  the  Stuart  period. 

2The  British  debt  between  the  Treaties  of  Aix-la-Chapelle  (1748)  and  Paris 
(1763)  increased  from  £72,000,000  to  £139,000,000.  In  the  same  period  the 
expense  of  the  American  establishment  grew  from  £70,000  to  £350,000. 


60  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

to  Pittsburgh  and  Detroit.  In  order  to  have  a  free  hand  to 
deal  with  the  Indians  and  to  prevent  the  colonies  from  a 
rapid  growth  beyond  his  control  by  westward  expansion,  King 
George,  in  October,  1763,  issued  a  proclamation  running  a  line 
along  the  crest  of  the  Alleghenies  and  ordered  all  colonists  who 
had  " either  willfully  or  inadvertently  seated  themselves"  on 
land  west  of  this  line  "forthwith  to  remove  themselves  from 
such  settlements." 

While  the  king  was  thus  hemming  in  the  colonists  between 
the  Alleghenies  and  the  Atlantic  he  thought  it  advisable  to 
place  a  garrison  of  10,000  troops  in  America.  The  British 
commanders  had  complained  bitterly  of  the  quality  of  the 
American  soldiers  in  the  French  war.  Even  General  Wolfe, 
on  hearing  of  Abercrombie's  defeat  at  Ticonderoga,  called  the 
Americans  "the  dirtiest  and  most  contemptible  cowardly  dogs 
that  you  can  conceive."  Some  colonies,  like  Connecticut  and 
Massachusetts,  had  given  liberally  and  felt  that  they  had  done 
more  than  their  share  in  defense.1  Others  had  refused  to  con- 
tribute, because  their  borders  were  not  threatened,  or  because 
they  were  too  busy  baiting  their  governors  to  think  of  the 
common  danger  to  the  empire.  England  had  been  in  the  habit 
of  making  money  grants  to  the  colonies  to  recompense  them 
for  military  expenditures.  In  the  years  from  1759  to  1761 
she  had  reimbursed  the  colonies  to  the  extent  of  £200,000. 
Would  it  not  be  better  to  replace  this  haphazard  system  of 
requisitions  and  compensation  by  a  regular  army  supported 
by  funds  to  which  the  colonies  should  contribute  a  certain 
quota  by  a  uniform  system  of  taxation?  Ireland,  poor  and 
burdened  as  she  was,  supported  an  army  of  1 2 ,000  for  imperial 
defense.  Nothing  was  said  in  the  Grenville  acts  of  the  deter- 
rent effects  of  a  regular  military  establishment  in  America  on 

1For  example,  the  war  expenses  of  Massachusetts  were  £818,000,  of  which 
£160,000  remained  in  1763  to  be  paid  by  provincial  taxation?  John  Hancock,  a 
merchant  of  Boston,  declared  that  he  was  taxed  more  heavily  than  any  man  in 
England.  Virginia  had  incurred  in  the  war  a  debt  of  £385,000  ;  Pennsylvania,  of 
£313,000  ;  New  York,  of  £291,000  ;  Connecticut,  of  £259,000 — all  sums  far  in 
excess  of  what  was  remitted  by  the  British  Parliament. 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  6l 

the  growth  of  the  sentiment  of  "independency,"  but  without 
doubt  that  aspect  of  the  plan  was  not  entirely  overlooked  by 
the  ministry.  Any  scheme  to  increase  the  number  of  royal 
officials  in  America  would  help  to  tighten  the  imperial  bond. 

But  the  chief  of  all  agencies  for  tightening  this  bond  would 
be  the  vigorous  enforcement  of  the  Acts  of  Trade,  which  had 
fallen  into  sad  neglect.  Two  parts  of  the  Old  Colonial  System 
were  fairly  well  observed,  because  they  brought  little  incon- 
venience to  the  American  merchant.1  But  the  act  of  1663, 
requiring  European  goods  to  be  brought  to  the  colonies  only 
via  England,  was  constantly  violated.  One  writer  estimates 
that  goods  to  the  value  of  £750,000  were  smuggled  into  the 
colonies  directly  from  European  ports  in  the  year  1765.  More- 
over, the  notorious  Sugar  and  Molasses  Act  of  1733,  designed 
to  ruin  the  trade  of  the  colonies  with  the  French  and  Dutch 
West  Indies,  was  a  dead  letter.  Tens  of  thousands  of  hogs- 
heads of  molasses  were  imported  into  Massachusetts  and  Rhode 
Island  annually,  and  only  the  most  trifling  duties  were  col- 
lected.2 Of  course,  during  the  war  with  France  such  traffic  was 
not  only  illicit  but  treasonable.  Admiral  Hawkes  testified  to 
the  Board  of  Trade  in  1750  that  he  "certainly  would  have 
taken  Martinique  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  provisions  with 
which  North  American  vessels,  to  the  knowledge  of  every 
captain  of  his  squadron,  supplied  the  French  island."  In  tha 
next  war  (1755-1763)  Admirals  Hawkes  and  Boscawen  found 
that  the  illicit  trade  with  the  American  mainland  was  all  that 
kept  the  French  Indies  from  "utter  collapse."  William  Pitt, 
indignant  that  any  part  of  the  empire  should  view  the  French 
as  other  than  enemies,  peremptorily  ordered  that  the  law  of 
1733  be  enforced,  even  if  the  navy  had  to  be  employed. 


1  Namely,  the  acts  of  1651  and  1660,  providing  that  the  trade  must  be  carried 
on  in  ships  built,  owned,  and  manned  by  British  subjects  and  that  the  "  enumer- 
ated" goods  be  senf'only  to  English  ports. 

2  The  reports  of  the  London  customhouse  show  an  average  return   of  less 
than  £1000  a  year  for  duties  on  molasses  under  the  act  of  1733,  whereas  Rhode 
Island  alone,  had  she  paid  the  duty  of  6d.  a  gallon  prescribed  by  the  act,  would 
have  contributed  £28,000  to  the  royal  treasury. 


62  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  case  seemed  clear  to  the  ministry,  and  they  proceeded 
j  with  confidence  to  formulate  a  plan  for  raising  a  revenue  in 
rtys America.  In  April,  1764,  the  Sugar"  Act  was  passed.  A  duty  of 
$d.  a  gallon  was  kept  on  molasses — enough  to  ruin  New  Eng- 
land trade  and  force  colonial  capital  into  manufactures,  which 
had  been  forbidden  by  the  English  statutes  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Duties  were  also  laid  on  wines,  silks,  cambrics,  and 
other  articles.  The  drawbacks  which  had  been  paid  on  Eu- 
ropean goods  reexported  from  England  to  the  colonies  were 
canceled.  New  duties  were  made  collectible  in  America.  This 
last  provision  necessitated  a  corps  of  revenue  officers  in  the 
colonial  ports,  the  multiplication  of  admiralty  courts,  and  the 
enlargement  of  naval  operations  on  the  American  coast.  Cer- 
tificates were  required  from  ship  captains,  describing  accurately 
the  contents  and  destination  of  cargoes.  Penalties  for  the 
infringement  of  the  law  were  severe.  It  was  evident  that  Eng- 
land had  entered  on  a  new  policy  of  colonial  control.  Samuel 
Adams  in  a  Boston  town  meeting  (May,  1764)  instructed  the 
delegates  to  the  Massachusetts  General  Court  to  rebuke  that 
assembly  for  not  taking  notice  of  "the  intention  of  the  British 
ministry  to  burden  us  with  new  taxes."  Two  months  later 
James  Otis,  in  his  "Rights  of  the  British  Colonies  Asserted  and 
Proved,"  invoked  "the  united  application  of  all  who  feel  ag- 
grieved" to  seek  redress.  That  sentiment  of  common  interest 
among  the  colonies  which  the  French  war  had  not  been  able  to 
stir  was  roused  by  the  Grenville  policy. 

It  was  estimated  that  the  new  taxes  of  1764,  with  the  saving 
of  the  drawbacks,  would  net  about  £45,000  a  year  to  the 
British  exchequer.  But  the  cost  of  the  military  and  fiscal 
machinery  in  America  would  amount  to  some  £360,000,  of  which 
the  colonies  were  to  be  asked  to  pay  about  a  third.  Grenville 
decided  that  the  most  effective  method  for  raising  the  major 
part  of  the  colonial  revenue  was  the  imposition  of  a  stamp 
tax,  which  had  been  recommended  several  times  during  the 
eighteenth  century.  Still,  he  was  willing  to  try  any  other  method 
which  the  colonies  had  to  suggest.  He  therefore  only  announced 
his  intention  of  imposing  a  stamp  tax  and  waited  a  full  year 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  63 

for  the  proposition  of  a  substitute  tax  by  the  colonies.  Pro- 
tests from  colonial  agents  against  any  kind  of  tax  at  all 
were  ruled  out  of  order — the  British  Parliament  was  not 
in  the  habit  of  receiving  petitions  against  revenue  bills.  In 
February,  £765,  a  listless  and  half-empty  House  of  Commons, 
by  a  vote  of  205  to  49,  and  a  still  more  listless  and  empty  House 
of  Lords,  without  division  or  debate,  passed  the  Stamp  Act, 
which,  says  Lecky,  "if  judged  from  its  consequences,  must 
be  deemed  one  of  the  most  momentous  legislative  acts  in  the 
history  of  mankind." 

To  the  astonishment  of  king  and  ministry  the  passage  of  the 
Stamp  Act  aroused  a  storm  of  opposition  in  America.  Its  en- 
forcement would  have  meant  the  thrusting  of  the  hand  of  the 
taxgatherer  into  all  the  transactions  of  colonial  business;  for 
by  the  terms  of  its  sixty  printed  pages  all  pamphlets  and  news- 
papers, all  legal  and  commercial  paper, — bills,  bonds,  leases, 
licenses,  deeds,  policies,  diplomas, — must  bear  the  stamp 
which  certified  that  duties  had  been  paid  thereon.  Ever  since 
1673  England  had  collected  slight  duties  in  America;  but 
these  had  been  solely  for  the  execution  of  the  imperial  com- 
mercial system,1  a  right  which  the  colonies  never  denied  in 
principle,  although  they  often  chafed  under  its  application. 
Even  the  duties  of  the  Sugar  Act  of  1764,  though  manifestly 
levied  for  the  purpose  of  revenue,  could  still  be  classed  under 
the  title  "  regulation  of  trade."  At  any  rate,  the  duties  would 
be  collected  only  in  the  ports  of  entry  and  would  directly 
affect  only  the  mercantile  class,  which  had  long  been  accus- 
tomed to  its  tiffs  with  collectors,  naval  officers,  and  admiralty 
judges.  But  the  new  stamps  would  be  distributed  all  over  the 
land.  They  would  be  in  every  court,  shop,  and  printing-house. 
They  would  pass  from  hand  to  hand  as  a  constant  reminder 
of  a  tax  imposed  by  a  legislature  three  thousand  miles  distant 
in  which  no  American  sat. 

1  Small  duties  had  been  collected  in  American  ports  on  tobacco,  sugar,  cotton, 
and  ginger  exported  from  one  colony  to  another,  in  order  to  prevent  these 
"enumerated"  goods  from  evading  the  law  of  1660  by  reaching  European  ports 
through  a  double  shipment. 


64  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Long  before  the  day  arrived  for  the  distribution  of  the 
stamps  (November  i,  1765)  the  colonies  were  seething  with 
protest.  Patrick  Henry's  resolutions  in  the  Virginia  assembly, 
on  May  29,  sounded  "the  alarm-bell  to  the  disaffected."  "The 
inhabitants  of  this  colony,"  he  said,  "are  not  bound  to  yield 
obedience  to  any  law  or  ordinance  imposing  taxation  upon 
them  without  their  consent,"  for  such  actions  "have  a  mani- 
fest tendency  to  destroy  British  as  well  as  American  freedom." 
In  June,  James  Otis  of  Massachusetts  proposed  a  meeting  of 
committees  from  the  colonial  assemblies  to  deal  with  "the 
threatened  invasion  of  the  rights  of  men  of  English  tradition." 
In  August,  mobs  in  Boston  hanged  Lord  Bute  and  Oliver  (the 
stamp  distributor)  in  effigy  and  sacked  the  elegant  mansion  of 
Chief  Justice  Hutchinson.  In  October,  twenty-seven  delegates 
from  nine  of  the  colonies  met  in  the  Stamp  Act  Congress  at 
New  York  and  joined  in  the  first  common  protest  of  Americans 
to  the  British  king  and  Parliament,  claiming  all  the  "inherent 
rights  and  liberties  of  the  king's  natural-born  subjects."  When 
the  first  of  November  arrived  not  an  agent  was  found  in 
America  to  distribute  the  stamps.  They  had  all  resigned. 

Even  King  George  now  realized  that  mischief  was  afoot. 
"I  am  more  and  more  grieved,"  he  wrote  to  Conway,  "at  the 
action  of  the  Americans.  Where  this  spirit  will  end  is  not  to 
be  said.  It  is  undoubtedly  the  most  serious  matter  that  ever 
came  before  Parliament."  When  Parliament  met,  on  Decem- 
ber 17,  1765,  the  enforcement  of  the  Stamp  Act  became  the 
absorbing  subject.  Burke  declared  that  "the  great  contests  for 
freedom  in  this  country  were  from  the  earliest  time  chiefly  on 
the  question  of  taxation,"  and  hailed  the  Americans  as  the 
descendants  of  the  men  who  had  withstood  the  illegal  imposi- 
tions of  Norman,  Plantagenet,  and  Stuart  kings.  Pitt,  asserting 
that  the  subject  was  the  greatest  that  had  ever  engaged  the 
attention  of  Parliament,  except  for  the  revolution  of  1688, 
vindicated  the  resistance  of  America.  "Taxation,"  he  cried, 
"is  no  part  of  the  governing  or  legislative  power.  The  taxes 
are  a  voluntary  gift  and  grant  of  the  Commons  alone.  .  .  .  The 
Commons  of  America,  represented  in  their  several  assemblies, 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  65 

have  ever  had  in  their  possession  this  constitutional  right  of 
granting  their  own  money.  ...  I  rejoice  that  America  has 
resisted.  Three  millions  of  people  so  dead  to  all  the  feelings 
of  liberty  as  voluntarily  to  submit  to  be  slaves  would  have 
been  fit  instruments  to  make  slaves  of  all  the  rest."  The  mer- 
chants of  England  petitioned  Parliament  for  the  repeal  of  the 
act.  Benjamin  Franklin,  summoned  to  the  bar  of  the  House 
of  Commons,  declared  that  there  was  not  gold  or  silver  enough 
in  the  colonies  to  pay  the  tax  for  a  single  year.  The  Rocking- 
ham  cabinet,  which  had  succeeded  Grenville's,  was  opposed 
to  the  coercion  of  the  colonies,  and  in  March,  1766,  the  Stamp 
Act  was  repealed  amid  rejoicings  "which  Burke  declared  un- 
precedented in  the  British  Empire.  The  colonists  voted  statues 
to  Pitt  and  King  George.  But  no  offer  was  made  to  raise  the 
imperial  funds;  and  Parliament  coupled  with  the  repeal  a 
Declaratory  Act,  asserting  their  "full  power  and  authority  to 
make  laws  to  bind  the  colonies  and  people  of  America  ...  in 
all  cases  whatsoever." 

The  controversy  over  the  Grenville  legislation  of  1764-1765 
illustrates  every  principle  of  the  quarrel  between  Great  Britain 
and  the  colonies.  It  revealed  suddenly  and  sharply  the  diver- 
gent economic  interests  and  political  ideals  which  had  been 
developing  for  a  century  and  a  half  on  both  sides  of  the 
Atlantic.  The  colony  of  Rhode  Island  remonstrated  with 
the  Board  of  Trade  against  the  act  of  1764,  declaring  that  the 
annual  excess  of  their  imports  over  their  exports  in  trade  with 
the  mother  country  was  £115,000,  which  balance  they  could 
pay  only  through  their  molasses  trade  with  the  (French)  West 
Indies.  But  the  English  treasury  officials  called  this  trade 
"  stolen  from  the  commerce  of  Great  Britain,  contrary  to  the 
fundamental  principle  of  colonisation,  to  every  maxim  of 
policy,  and  to  the  express  provisions  of  the  law."  The  colonists 
denied  the  right  of  Parliament  to  tax  them  or  even  to  legislate 
for  them,  since  Parliament  could  not  extend  its  power  beyond 
its  constituents,  the  people  of  Great  Britain.  For  England  to 
concede,  however,  that  the  colonial  assemblies  took  the  place 
of  Parliament  would  be  practically  to  concede  America's 


66  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

independence.  The  king  could  not  be  the  bond  of  union,  as  the 
colonists  asserted  that  he  was,  because  the  king  was  not  sover- 
eign in  England.  Parliament  was  sovereign  there,  and,  accord- 
ing to  the  British  view,  the  colonies  as  corporations  were  subject 
to  the  sovereign  power  of  Parliament,  while  the  individual 
inhabitants  of  the  colonies  enjoyed  all  the  personal  rights  of 
English  freemen.  These  were  radically  conflicting  ideas,  and 
it  did  not  serve  to  clarify  the  situation  when  John  Adams 
and  James  Otis  appealed  from  the  power  of  Parliament  to  a 
British  " constitution"  with  which  a  law  of  Parliament  might 
be  in  conflict.  The  English  government  knew  no  such  con- 
stitution. It  was  the  "higher  law,"  or  the  inherent  "rights  of 
man,"  that  the  colonists  were  setting  up.1  To  follow  that  law 
against  the  positive  law  of  the  realm  could  have  only  one 
result — revolution . 

To  the  supporters  of  the  ministry  the  arguments  of  the 
colonists  seemed  only  sophistry  to  justify  their  disobedience. 
Their  protestations  of  loyalty  to  the  crown  seemed  only  hy- 
pocrisy when  coupled  with  defiance  of  the  Parliament  to  which 
the  crown  itself  was  subordinate.  "You  say  you  are  British 
subjects,"  cried  Hutchinson,  "and  yet  you  suppose  that  you  are 
constitutionally  exempt  from  one  of  the  obligations  which 
British  subjects  are  under.  But  if  you  are  exempt  from  one, 
you  are  exempt  from  all,  and  so  are  not  British  subjects  at  all." 
As  to  the  colonists'  argument  that  they  were  not  represented 
in  Parliament,  who  gave  them  the  right  to  dictate  their  own 
provincial  theories  of  representation  to  the  sovereign  body? 
All  the  non-noble  subjects  of  the  British  crown  were  repre- 
sented in  the  House  of  Commons,  wherever  they  lived.  If 
Philadelphia  and  New  York  had  no  delegates  at  Westminster, 
neither  had  Manchester  and  Sheffield ! 

aThe  Pennsylvania  assembly  was  the  first  to  voice  the  doctrine  of  "natural 
rights,"  which  became  the  main  argument  of  Thomas  Jefferson  and  other  radi- 
cals as  the  Revolution  approached.  The  assembly  declared  that  the  government 
of  Pennsylvania  was  "founded  on  the  natural  rights  of  man  and  is  or  ought  to 
be  perfectly  free."  It  would  be  hard  to  find  any  justification  for  this  language 
in  the  charter  of  Pennsylvania,  which,  curiously  enough,  was  the  only  Stuart 
charter  that  expressly  reserved  to  Parliament  the  right  to  tax  the  colony. 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  67 

The  case  seemed  perfectly  clear  to  George  Ill's  ministers. 
They  had  imposed  a  reasonable  tax  on  America,  in  a  consider- 
ate manner,  through  the  sovereign  body  of  the  empire.  The 
case  seemed  equally  clear  to  the  American  " patriots."  They  had 
levied  their  own  taxes  in  their  assemblies  since  the  earliest  days. 
They  looked  on  this  privilege  as  the  chief  guarantee  of  their 
liberty.  They  had  no  members  sitting  in  the  British  Parliament, 
and  hence  no  way  of  redress  in  case  of  unfair  or  oppressive 
legislation.  Here  the  matter  rested,  with  the  repeal  of  the  Stamp 
Act  in  1766;  and  here  it  might  have  rested  indefinitely  if  the 
British  ministry  had  stood  by  the  repeal.  The  question  was  not 
settled:  it  was  deadlocked. 

The  agitation  stirred  in  1765  and  the  relief  manifested  in 
1 766  would  have  convinced  a  wiser  ministry  and  king  that  the 
revenues  anticipated  from  America  by  taxation  were  of  trifling 
value  compared  with  the  harmony  of  the  empire.  The  British 
ministry,  however,  was  not  willing  to  let  the  matter  rest.  The 
alternate  advance  and  retreat  in  the  decade  following  the  Gren- 
ville  legislation,  the  "  blundering  into  a  policy  one  day  and 
blundering  out  of  it  the  next,"  as  Burke  called  it  in  his  famous 
"Speech  on  Conciliation"  in  17 74,  represented  the  dogged  vacil- 
lation of  the  Tory  ministers  of  George  III.  The  repeal  of  the 
Stamp  Act  marked  the  abandonment  of  the  attempt  to  raise 
a  revenue  in  America  by  "internal  taxation,"  leaving  the 
colonies  apparently  the  victors — "a  fatal  compliance,"  as 
George  III  said  a  few  years  later.  When  Charles  Townshend 
returned  to  the  charge  in  1767,  it  was  on  the  ground  of  "exter- 
nal taxation,"  or  imperial  trade  regulation,  a  right  grudgingly 
conceded  by  the  colonies  at  the  beginning  of  their  fight  on  the 
stamp  duties.  But  that  fight  had  raised  in  them  a  spirit  of 
protest  against  any  kind  of  taxation  by  the  British  Parliament. 
Townshend's  duties  on  painters'  colors,  paper,  glass,  and  tea 
were  resented  only  less  defiantly  than  Grenville's  stamps.1 

!The  Townshend  Acts  were  especially  odious  in  that  they  authorized  Writs 
of  Assistance  to  search  men's  private  premises  for  smuggled  goods  and  greatly 
enlarged  the  personnel  of  the  customs  department  in  America.  These  measures 
were  only  the  belated  execution  of  the  Navigation  Acts  of  1672  and  1696,  but 


68  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Nonimportation  agreements,  evasions,  smuggling,  and  intim- 
idation followed  on  protests  in  the  colonies.  Samuel  Adams 
of  Massachusetts  drew  up  a  letter,  in  February,  1768,  to  be 
communicated  to  the  colonial  assemblies,  in  which  he  advanced 
the  astonishing  theory  that  "His  Majesty's  royal  predecessors 
were  graciously  pleased  to  form  a  subordinate  legislature  here, 
that  their  subjects  might  enjoy  the  inalienable  right  of  repre- 
sentation." Imagine  such  a  thought's  having  crossed  the  mind 
of  Charles  I  when  he  granted  the  Massachusetts  charter  of 
1629 — just  at  the  moment  when  he  dismissed  his  Parliament 
in  England  and  started  on  his  eleven  years  of  "personal  rule" ! 
When  the  Massachusetts  assembly  refused  by  a  vote  of  92  to 
17  to  withdraw  the  letter,  two  British  regiments  were  sent  to 
Boston  to  awe  the  inhabitants  into  obedience.  Roughs  baited 
the  redcoats  in  the  streets,  pelting  them  with  brickbats  and 
calling  them  "lobsters"  and  "bloody-backs."  In  the  riot  that 
followed  (March,  1770)  five  men  were  killed.  The  funeral  of 
these  victims  of  the  "Boston  Massacre"  was  made  the  occa- 
sion for  a  popular  demonstration  engineered  by  Samuel  Adams ; 
and  each  anniversary  of  the  affray  was  celebrated  in  Boston 
with  incendiary  speeches  against  British  tyranny,  until  the 
national  fete  of  the  Fourth  of  July  furnished  a  nobler  patriotic 
holiday.  After  the  "massacre"  the  troops  were  withdrawn  and 
the  Townshend  duties  repealed  (except  for  a  trifling  tax  on 
tea).  Therewith  the  attempt  of  Parliament  to  raise  a  revenue 
in  America  was  abandoned. 

For  three  years  thereafter  there  was  comparative  calm.  The 
colonies  were  hardly  mentioned  in  Parliament.  Their  trade 
with  England  revived,  imports  rising  from  £1,634,000  in  1769 
to  £4,200,000  in  1771.  In  spite  of  the  efforts  of  the  radicals 
to  prevent  the  importation  and  sale  of  tea,  a  good  deal  of 
that  article  found  its  way  into,  the  houses  of  the  colonial 
dames.  The  British  East  India  Company  had  17,000,000 

they  were  resisted  as  encouraging  "  a  swarm  of  office-holders  to  live  on  the  fruits 
of  colonial  labor  and  industry."  At  the  same  moment  (June,  1767)  the  assembly 
of  New  York  was  suspended  for  refusing  to  obey  a  Quartering  Act  which  was  a 
part  of  the  Grenville  legislation. 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  69 

pounds  of  tea  stored  in  warehouses  in  England,  on  which  they 
would  have  to  pay  a  duty  of  a  shilling  a  pound  before  they 
could  dispose  of  it  in  Great  Britain.  The  company  was  finan- 
cially embarrassed,  and  the  ministry  proposed  the  wily  scheme 
of  benefiting  its  shareholders  in  England  and  furnishing  it 
with  customers  in  America  by  drawing  back  the  shilling  duty 
and  allowing  the  company  to  sell  the  tea  in  the  colonies,  subject 
only  to  the  duty  of  3d.  a  pound  in  America.  The  revenue  to 
the  crown  would  be  trifling.  The  object  was  rather  to  tempt 
the  colonies  to  acknowledge  the  authority  of  the  British  Par- 
liament to  tax  them.  As  Lord  North  bluntly  confessed,  "The 
King  meant  to  try  the  case  in  America."1  The  result  of  the 
"trial"  is  well  known.  Not  an  ounce  of  the  2051  chests  of 
tea  sent  to  America  was  received  by  the  consignees.  The  ships 
arriving  at  Philadelphia  and  New  York  were  sent  back  with 
their  cargoes  intact.  The  tea  that  was  landed  at  Charleston 
was  seized  by  the  authorities  of  the  province  and  afterwards 
sold  at  auction  for  the  benefit  of  the  American  cause.  The 
people  of  Boston  having  failed  to  persuade  Governor  Hutch- 
inson  (two  of  whose  sons  were  among  the  consignees)  to 
give  clearance  papers  for  the  three  tea  ships  anchored  at 
Griffin's  wharf,  a  band  of  citizens  disguised  as  Mohawk  Indians 
boarded  the  ships  in  the  evening  of  December_i£,  1773,  and,  : 
ripping  open  342  chests  of  tea,  dumped  the  contents  into  Boston  . 
Harbor. 

In  this  semitragic,  semicomic  act  ended  the  Grenville  policy 
inaugurated  a  decade  earlier.  It  had  been  contracted  to  nar- 
rower and  pettier  lines  by  Townshend  and  Lord  North,  until  it 
dwindled  down  to  a  tricky  attempt  to  enforce  a  three-penny 
tax.  The  destruction  of  the  tea  drew  down  upon  the  people  of 
Massachusetts  the  first  punitive  measures  of  the  British  govern- 
ment. The  cup  of  the  colony's  offense  was  full  to  the  brim. 
The  Otises,  Warrens,  Quincys,  and,  above  all,  the  "brace  of 
Adamses"  had  aroused  a  spirit  of  rebellion  and  organized  an 

irThe  king  wrote  to  North  in  September,  1774,  that  he  had  "no  inclination  for 
the  present  to  lay  fresh  taxes,"  but  that  there  "must  always  be  one  tax  to  keep 
up  the  right." 


70  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

"invisible  government"1  which  must  be  put  down  once  for  all. 
A  series  of  acts  of  Parliament  in  the  spring  of  1774  (called  by 
the  colonists  "the  Intolerable  Acts")  sounded  the  challenge  to 
submission  or  defiance.  The  port  of  Boston  was  closed  until 
the  colony  should  pay  the  East  India  Company  for  the  tea 
destroyed.  The  charter  of  1691  was  practically  abrogated, 
the  choice  of  various  executive  officers  being  transferred  from 
the  people  to  the  royal  governor.  The  town  meeting  was  for- 
bidden to  assemble  without  the  governor's  permission,  except 
for  the  routine  business  of  elections.  A  new  Quartering  Act 
required  the  province  to  provide  lodging  and  food  for  British 
soldiers.  Officers  or  magistrates  charged  with  murder  in  sup- 
pressing riots  or  executing  revenue  laws  could  be  sent  to  Eng- 
land for  trial.  Thomas  Hutchinson,  the  ablest  of  the  royal 
governors  of  Massachusetts,  left  for  England  in  June,  1774, 
and  was  succeeded  by  General  Gage,  who  declared  that  with 
four  regiments  of  soldiers  he  could  quell  the  rebellious  spirit  of 
the  colony:  "They  will  be  lions  while  we  are  lambs,  but  if  we 
take  the  resolute  part  they  will  prove  very  meek." 

The  British  government  thought  that  it  was  punishing  a  prov- 
ince, but  found  that  it  was  declaring  war  on  America.  The 
colonies,  from  New  Hampshire  to  South  Carolina,  made  the 
cause  of  Massachusetts  their  own.  Food  and  money  were  sent 
to  relieve  the  inhabitants  of  Boston  from  the  distress  caused 
by  the  closing  of  her  port.  The  Virginia  Burgesses  adopted 
Jefferson's  resolution  appointing  the  day  on  which  the  Boston 
port  bill  went  into  effect  as  a  day  of  humiliation  and  prayer, 
"to  give  us  one  heart  and  mind  firmly  to  oppose  every  injury  to 
American  rights ;  and  that  the  minds  of  his  Majesty  and  par- 

1  Samuel  Adams  had  formed  Committees  of  Correspondence  among  all  the 
towns  of  the  province  in  1772.  They  were  unofficial  groups  of  patriots  to  keep 
alive  the  agitation  against  the  British  governors  "when  the  flame  of  liberty 
burned  low."  The  Tory  pamphleteer  Daniel  Leonard  called  these  committees 
"the  foulest,  subtlest,  and  most  venomous  serpent  ever  issued  from  the  egg  of 
sedition."  Thomas  Jefferson,  through  whose  influence  the  committees  were  made 
intercolonial,  wrote  many  years  later  (1818)  to  Governor  Tyler  of  Virginia,  "To 
these  little  republics  [of  New  England]  we  owe  the  vigor  given  to  the  Revolution 
at  its  commencement  in  the  eastern  States." 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  71 

liament  may  be  inspired  from  above  with  wisdom,  moderation, 
and  justice."  For  this  impertinence  the  House  of  Burgesses 
was  promptly  dissolved  by  the  governor,  but  the  members, 
meeting  informally  at  the  Raleigh  Tavern,  sent  out  the  call  for 
an  annual  congress  of  all  the  colonies.  One  after  another  the 
colonies  fell  into  line,  until  all  but  Georgia  had  chosen  delegates. 
On  the  fifth  day  of  September,  1774,  the  fifty-five  members  of 
the  First  Continental  Congress  met  in  Carpenter's  Hall,  at 
Philadelphia.  America  was  organized.  From  this  time  forth 
there  was  a  public  body,  representative  of  the  common  interests 
of  her  colonies.  The  Continental  Congress  laid  the  foundation 
of  the  American  federal  nation. 

TtiE  DECLARATION  OF  INDEPENDENCE 

Protest,  nullification,  armed  resistance,  independence, — these 
are  the  steps  in  the  reply  of  the  colonies  to  what  they  deemed 
British  oppression.  The  stages  are  not  sharply  defined.  There 
were  some  colonial  leaders,  no  doubt,  who  early  became  con- 
vinced that  they  could  never  preserve  their  liberties  in  con- 
nection with  the  British  Empire ;  and  there  were  many  who  had 
not  advanced  beyond  the  stage  of  protest  when  the  majority 
were  ready  for  independence.  There  is  no  one  of  the  leaders, 
from  the  radical  Patrick  Henry  to  the  conservative  Dickinson 
or  Galloway,  whose  views  we  can  call  "typical"  in  the  decade 
succeeding  the  Stamp  Act.  The  transactions  of  the  First  Con- 
tinental Congress,  however,  were  a  long  step  toward  the  con- 
solidation of  public  opinion  in  America ;  for  the  common 
statement  of  grievances  there  presented  and  the  adoption  of  a 
colony-wide  plan  for  the  boycott  of  British  trade  may  be  called 
the  first  expression  of  the  will  of  a  united  America. 

The  Congress  was  radical.  Its  members  had  been  chosen  by 
Committees  of  Correspondence,  Committees  of  Safety,  or  pro- 
vincial mass  meetings,  and  in  only  two  instances  (Massa- 
chusetts and  Pennsylvania)  by  colonial  legislatures.  On  the 
motion  of  Samuel  Adams  it  forthwith  indorsed  the  Suffolk 
Resolves,  in  which  the  patriots  of  the  county  containing  the 


72  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

rebellious  town  of  Boston  had  declared  that  the  Intolerable  Acts 
were  void,  had  instructed  the  tax  collectors  not  to  pay  the  public 
money  over  to  the  king's  officers,  and  had  even  advised  the  in- 
habitants of  the  town  to  train  a  militia  force  and  to  elect  dele- 
gates to  a  provincial  congress  to  govern  the  colony  in  place  of 
the  legislature  under  General  Gage.  This  was  a  virtual  decla- 
ration of  independence.  James  Galloway,  a  conservative  dele- 
gate from  Pennsylvania,  proposed  a  plan,  which  was  approved 
by  the  Earl  of  Chatham  (Pitt)  and  several  other  leading  Whigs 
in  England,  for  a  permanent  congress  of  the  united  colonies  at 
Philadelphia,  with  power  to  concur  with  Parliament  in  all 
legislation  affecting  America.  But  Galloway's  plan  was  rejected, 
and  even  the  report  of  it  was  expunged  from  the  journals  of 
Congress.  Instead,  there  was  adopted  a  "Declaration  of  Rights 
and  Grievances,"  a  kind  of  ultimatum  to  Great  Britain,  in  which 
the  extreme  claims  of  the  colonies  were  put  forward.  It  called 
for  the  repeal  of  a  dozen  acts  passed  since  the  Grenville 
ministry,  especially  the  Intolerable  Acts,  which  were  character- 
ized as  "impolitick,  unjust,  cruel,  and  unconstitutional."  The 
colonists  migrating  from  their  mother  country,  it  claimed,  lost 
none  of  their  rights,  which  were  based  on  "the  immutable  laws  of 
nature,  the  principles  of  the  English  constitution,  and  the  several 
charters  or  compacts."1  An  agreement  called  the  "Association," 
boycotting  both  import  and  export  trade  with  Great  Britain, 
a  petition  to  the  king,  and  addresses  to  the  inhabitants  of 
the  province  of  Quebec,2  to  the  people  of  England,  and  to  the 

1Note  the  order  of  the  sources  from  which  these  rights  are  derived.  Thomas 
Jefferson  sent  to  the  Virginia  convention — which  met  in  August,  1774,  to  choose 
delegates  to  the  Congress— a  paper  containing  a  draft  of  instructions  to  the  mem- 
bers, which  was  printed  under  the  title,  "A  Summary  View  of  the  Rights  of  Brit- 
ish America."  Next  to  Thomas  Paine's  "Common  Sense"  the  "Summary  View" 
was  the  most  influential  of  all  the  Revolutionary  pamphlets.  It  contains  the  first 
clear  statement  in  modern  history  of  the  doctrine  of  expatriation,,  claiming  that  the 
emigrants  to  the  American  colonies  were  released  from  all  connection  with  Great 
Britain  except  their  voluntary  allegiance  to  the  crown.  Parliament  was  as  "for- 
eign" a  body  for  them  as  the  Spanish  cortes  or  the  diet  of  the  Holy  Roman  Em- 
pire !  Jefferson  called  the  Continental  Congress  "your  great  American  Council." 

2  The  Congress  exposed  itself  to  not  a  little  ridicule  from  the  Tories  for  its  in- 
consistency in  the  addresses  to  the  English  people  and  to  the  Canadians.  In  the 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  73 

American  colonists  completed  the  series  of  papers  put  forth  by 
the  Congress.  Chatham  declared  them  unrivaled  for  "solidity 
of  reason,  force  of  sagacity,  and  wisdom  of  conclusion."  The 
Congress  adjourned  in  October,  1774,  to  meet  again  in  the 
following  May  in  case  their  grievances  were  not  redressed. 

Before  we  study  under  what  changed  and  exciting  conditions 
the  Congress  reconvened  on  May  10,  1775,  it  is  well  to  examine 
the  theory  which  underlay  the  Declaration  of  Rights  and 
Grievances.  It  has  often  been  remarked  that  the  Americans 
of  the  Revolutionary  epoch  were  far  closer  to  their  ancestors 
of  the  seventeenth  century  than  to  contemporary  Englishmen. 
Certain  it  is  that  Hooker's  remark  in  the  "Ecclesiastical  Polity," 
that  "governments  cannot  be  legitimate  unless  resting  on  the 
consent  of  the  governed,"  and  John  Locke's  theory  in  the  "Essay 
on  Civil  Government,"  that  "men  naturally  free,  equal,  and 
independent  form  political  societies  in  which  they  delegate  to 
a  government  certain  restricted  powers  for  securing  the  tran- 
quillity, the  safety  and  welfare  of  the  people,"  seemed  like 
self-evident  truths  to  the  colonists.  Their  ancestors  had  left 
the  homeland  in  great  numbers  in  the  seventeenth  century  for 
the  sake  of  vindicating  these  truths.  All  their  traditions  were 
those  of  compact  between  free  and  equal  people,  whether 
associating  in  the  commercial  companies  of  Virginia  and  the 
Carolinas  or  building  the  Congregational  churches  of  the 
Northern  colonies,  or  laying  the  foundations  for  the  little  "body 
politick"  in  the  cabin  of  the  Mayflower.  They  did  not  have 
to  learn  the  doctrine  of  government  as  a  public  service,  because 
they  had  never,  from  the  days  of  Archbishop  Laud  to  the  days 
of  Lord  North,  allowed  the  practice  of  government  as  a  divine 
right  to  be  established  on  these  shores. 

This  sense  of  their  dignity  as  English  freemen,  inherited  from 
their  ancestors  of  the  seventeenth  century,  was  strengthened  by 
the  philosophy  of  the  eighteenth  century,  which  taught  the 

former  it  raised  the  bogy  of  Roman  Catholicism,  accusing  George  III  of  trying 
to  fasten  "  popery "  on  all  the  colonies,  as  James  II  had  tried  to  fasten  it  on  Eng- 
land ;  while  in  the  latter  it  cited  the  case  of  Switzerland  to  show  how  Protestant 
and  Catholic  could  dwell  together  in  unity. 


74  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

natural,  inalienable  rights  of  the  individual  and  his  unlimited 
perfectibility.  Every  act  of  authority  outside  the  "natural" 
sphere  of  parentage,  guardianship,  or  such  necessary  personal 
relationships  verged  toward  tyranny.  Political  associations 
arose  out  of  the  "social  compact"  and  were  simply  the  ex- 
pression of  the  "nature  and  constitution  of  man  in  the  relations 
he  has  to  the  beings  that  surround  him."  Men  ceased  in  this 
doctrine  to  be  the  creatures  of  the  state  and  became  its  creators. 
"The  sovereign,"  said  Jefferson  in  1774,  "has  had  rights  and 
the  people  only  privileges  till  now.  This  rule  must  be  reversed. 
It  is  the  people  who  have  all  the  rights  and  the  sovereigns  have 
only  very  limited  privileges." 

The  events  of  the  ten  years  between  the  Grenville  legislation 
and  the  meeting  of  the  Continental  Congress  revealed  how  far 
apart  were  the  men  of  English  speech  and  blood  on  both  sides 
of  the  Atlantic.  To  the  British  government,  and  doubtless  to 
a  great  majority  of  the  English  people,1  the  behavior  of  the 
colonists  in  that  decade  seemed  like  willful  rebellion.  English 
statesmen  knew  nothing  of  that  fictitious  "constitution,"  above 
Parliament  and  the  king,  which  by  conferring  "natural  rights" 
on  the  colonists  as  men  allowed  them  to  slip  out  of  their  respon- 
sibilities as  subjects.  It  was  a  much  more  serious  thing  than 
"mutual  misunderstanding"  between  England  and  her  colonies. 
It  was  rather  mutual  despite  for  political  ideals,  which  each 
side  cherished  the  more  tenaciously  under  opposition,  that  led 
to  the  break.  The  year  1774  had  not  closed  before  George  III 
had  stiated  the  dilemma  in  a  letter  to  Lord  North:  "We 
must  either  master  them  or  totally  leave  them  to  themselves 
as  aliens." 

When  the  Continental  Congress  reconvened  on  May  10, 
1775,  it  was  confronted  by  "a  condition  and  not  a  theory." 

!We  must  not  be  deceived  by  the  Whig  orators  in  Parliament  into  believing 
that  they  represented  the  English  nation.  Lord  North  was  more  popular  than 
Edmund  Burke.  Thomas  Hutchinson,  who  returned  from  the  governorship  of 
Massachusetts  to  England  in  the  autumn  of  1774,  wrote  back,  "I  am  persuaded 
that  there  never  has  been  a  time  when  the  nation  in  general  was  so  united 
against  the  colonies." 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  75 

The  king  had  rejected  the  petition  of  1774.  Chatham,  eulogiz- 
ing the  Congress  and  demanding  the  withdrawal  of  the  British 
troops  from  Boston,  had  secured  but  eighteen  votes  in  the 
House  of  Lords,  while  both  branches  of  Parliament  by  large 
majorities  assured  the  king  of  their  "support  at  all  hazards 
to  put  down  rebellion."  The  Massachusetts  "minutemen"  had 
already  faced  the  British  redcoats,  musket  in  hand,  on  Lexing- 
ton green  and  at  Concord  bridge.  Sixteen  thousand  New 
England  farmers,  armed  with  their  old  smooth-bores  and 
blunderbusses  of  the  French  and  Indian  wars,  were  closing  in 
upon  Gage's  regiments  in  Boston.  On  May  16  the  provincial 
congress  of  Massachusetts  wrote  to  the  Continental  Congress 
at  Philadelphia,  asking  it  to  take  command  of  the  army  around 
Boston  "for  the  general  defence  of  the  rights  of  America"  and 
to  devise  a  government  for  the  country.  It  was  too  late  to 
avoid  bloodshed.  Congress  must  either  put  itself  at  the  head 
of  such  union  as  there  was  in  America  or  leave  the  colonies  to 
anarchy  and  New  England  to  the  vengeance  of  the  British 
troops.  It  did  not  hesitate  in  its  choice.  George  Washington 
was  appointed  commander  of  the  "continental  army"  in  June, 
and  on  July  6  Congress  issued  a  spirited  "Declaration  of  Causes 
for  Taking  up  Arms."  "We  are  reduced  to  the  alternative  of 
chusing  an  unconditional  submission  to  the  tyranny  of  irritable 
ministers  or  resistance  by  force.  The  latter  is  our  choice.  We 
have  counted  the  cost  of  this  contest,  and  find  nothing  so  dread- 
ful as  voluntary  slavery.  Our  cause  is  just.  Our  union  is 
perfect.  .  .  .  We  mean  not  to  dissolve  that  union  [between 
England  and  the  colonies]  which  has  so  long  and  so  happily 
existed  and  which  we  sincerely  wish  to  see  restored.  Necessity 
has  not  yet  driven  us  to  that  desperate  measure.  ...  In 
defence  of  the  freedom  which  is  our  birthright  we  have  taken 
up  arms.  We  shall  lay  them  down  when  hostility  shall  cease 
on  the  part  of  our  aggressors." 

Some  of  the  delegates  had  come  to  the  second  meeting  of  the 
Continental  Congress  ready  to  follow  Samuel  Adams  in  declar- 
ing immediate  independence,  seizing  the  king's  officers,  and 
soliciting  the  aid  of  France  and  Spain.  But  the  conservatives 


76  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

were  numerous  enough  to  persuade  the  Congress  again  to 
"whine  in  the  Style  of  humble  petitioners"  to  the  king.  In  a 
dutiful  memorial  John  Dickinson  protested  the  attachment 
of  the  colonists  to  "his  Majesty's  person,  family,  and  govern- 
ment," deplored  the  common  misfortune  to  Englishmen  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic  should  fratricidal  strife  divide  them,  and 
begged  George  III  by  healing  the  dispute  to  transmit  his  name 
to  posterity  "adorned  with  that  signal  and  lasting  glory  that 
has  attended  the  memory  of  those  illustrious  personages  whose 
virtues  and  abilities  have  extricated  states  from  dangerous 
conditions,  and  by  securing  happiness  to  others  have  erected 
the  most  noble  and  durable  monuments  to  their  own  fame." 
Dickinson  mistook  his  man.  It  was  not  for  George  III  but  for 
George  Washington  that  this  lofty  service  and  this  enduring 
fame  were  reserved. 

Every  month  of  the  session  of  Congress  gave  fresh  proof 
of  the  impossibility  of  effecting  a  reconciliation.  The  king 
proclaimed  the  colonies  in  a  state  of  rebellion,  prohibited  all 
trade  and  intercourse  with  them,  set  fire  to  their  towns,  and 
hired  German  soldiers  to  reduce  them  to  obedience.  Congress, 
on  the  other  hand,  maintained  an  army  in  active  opposition  to 
the  royal  governor  of  Massachusetts,  appointed  diplomatic 
agents  to  approach  the  courts  of  Europe  for  aid,  and  recom- 
mended the  patriots  of  New  Hampshire,  South  Carolina,  and 
Virginia  to  follow  the  lead  of  Massachusetts  in  establishing 
such  a  form  of  government  as  would  "best  produce  the  hap- 
piness of  the  people  and  secure  peace  and  good  order  during  the 
continuance  of  the  present  dispute  between  Great  Britain  and 
the  colonies."  It  is  hard  to  imagine  what  further  act  of  sover- 
eignty the  Congress  could  perform;  and  yet  it  deferred  the 
declaration  of  the  independence  of  America  a  full  year  from 
the  day  when  it  so  confidently  announced  the  justice  of  the 
colonies'  taking  up  arms  against  their  king. 

Was  it  fidelity,  caution,  fear,  or  calculation  that  postponed 
so  long  the  declaration  of  American  independence?  This 
question  cannot  be  answered  in  a  word.  Pages  could  be  filled 
with  the  protestations  of  loyalty  uttered  by  leading  Americans 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  77 

in  the  decade  preceding  the  battle  of  Lexington.1  Hypocrisy 
and  lip  service !  cry  the  Tory  historians  of  the  Revolution.  But 
we  need  not  attribute  hypocrisy  to  men  like  Washington  and 
Jefferson,  Franklin  and  Adams,  to  explain  their  protestations 
of  loyalty  to  the  British  Empire  in  the  midst  of  their  resistance 
to  parliamentary  legislation.  The  very  empire,  as  they  under- 
stood it,  was  the  guaranty  of  certain  immemorial  rights,  and 
in  the  invasion  of  those  rights  they  saw  the  danger  of  the  dis- 
solution of  the  empire.  Their  case  was  like  that  of  many 
men  of  the  South  in  the  decade  preceding  the  Civil  War. 
Alexander  H.  Stephens  protested  to  the  last,  vigorously  and 
honestly,  his  love. for  the  Union — so  long  as  it  should  guarantee 
what  he  considered  to  be  the  constitutional  rights  of  the 
American  commonwealths.  He  became  the  vice  president  of 
the  Confederacy. 

But  aside  from  sentimental  attachment  to  Great  Britain, 
there  were  certain  very  practical  considerations  which  held  the 
colonies  back  from  a  final  break.  Until  they  should  be  prepared 
to  act  in  unison  a  proclamation  of  their  independence  would  be 
rash  and  premature.  In  spite  of  the  brave  words  of  July  6, 
1775,  the  union  of  the  colonies  was  not  "perfect,"  however  just 
their  cause.  As  late  as  January,  1776,  New  York,  Pennsylvania, 
Maryland,  and  New  Jersey  instructed  their  delegates  in  Con- 
gress to  vote  against  independence.  Unless  they  all  "hung 
together,"  as  Richard  Penn  remarked  with  grim  humor,  they 
were  all  likely  to  "hang  separately."  To  confess  themselves 
rebels  would  close  the  door  to  reconciliation.  And  to  fail  in  their 

1  Some  of  the  most  pronounced  of  these  remarks  are :  "  Independence,  which 
none  but  rebels,  fools,  or  madmen  will  contend  for"  (James  Otis,  1765)  ;  "I  have 
never  heard  in  any  conversation  from  any  person  drunk  or  sober  the  least 
expression  of  a  wish  for  separation  from  England"  (Benjamin  Franklin,  1774) ; 
"  That  there  are  any  who  pant  after  independence  is  the  greatest  slander  on  the 
province  [of  Massachusetts!]"  (John  Adams,  1775);  "Until  after  the  rejection 
of  the  second  petition  of  Congress,  I  never  heard  an  American  of  any  class  or 
description  express  a  wish  for  independence"  (John  Jay)  ;  "It  is  well  known 
that  in  July,  1775,  a  separation  from  Great  Britain  and  the  establishment  of  a 
Republican  Government  had  not  yet  entered  into  any  person's  mind"  (Thomas 
Jefferson,  1782)  ;  "I  am  well  satisfied  that  no  such  thing  [as  independence]  is 
desired  by  any  thinking  man  in  all  North  America  "(George  Washington,  1774). 


78  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

rebellion  would  be  to  offer  their  heads  to  the  executioner. 
"Congress  gave  signal  proof  of  their  indulgence/'  wrote  Jef- 
ferson, "and  of  their  great  desire  not  to  go  too  fast  for  any 
respectable  part  of  our  body." 

If  some  feared  anarchy,  others  feared  despotism.  There  was 
a  deep-seated  apprehension  among  the  people  of  the  new  states 
that  their  liberties  might  be  encroached  on  by  Congress. 
George  Ill's  government  was  offensive,  to  be  sure;  but  might 
not  a  victorious  general  here  subdue  the  states  to  a  submission 
the  more  deplorable  as  it  would  be  self-invited,  and  the  more 
intolerable  as  its  agents  would  be  near  at  hand?  Was  it  not 
better  to  correct  the  ills  they  had  than  to  fly  to  others  that  they 
knew  not  of?  And  might  there  not  perhaps  be  some  truth  in 
the  contemptuous  irony  with  which  Dean  Tucker  of  Gloucester 
had  dismissed  the  whole  question:  "Independence  would  be  a 
cheap  and  excellent  punishment  for  the  colonies"? 

The  natural  reluctance  of  the  commercial  classes  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic  to  have  their  profitable  connection  broken 
was  another  deterrent  from  independence.  In  the  debates  on  the 
nonintercourse  agreement,  in  September,  1774,  Samuel  Chase 
of  Maryland  predicted  that  bankruptcy  for  England  would  re- 
sult if  the  measure  were  adopted.  "Two  thirds  of  the  Colonies," 
he  said,  "are  clothed  in  British  manufactures."  Richard  Henry 
Lee  (who  later  proposed  the  motion  for  independence)  thought 
that  the  same  ship  that  carried  the  nonimportation  resolutions 
to  England  would  bring  back  the  redress.  George  III  and  his 
political  allies  had  to  be  on  the  alert  to  combat  the  commercial 
pacifists  who  rose  in  Parliament  to  present  petitions  from  the 
merchants  of  their  towns  and  counties  praying  for  an  accom- 
modation with  the  colonies  for  the  salvation  of  their  trade. 

Finally,  English  politics  complicated  the  question  of 
American  independence.  If  the  postponement  of  the  decla- 
ration tended  to  unite  opinion  in  America,  it  also  tended  to 
divide  opinion  in  Great  Britain.  So  long  as  the  colonies  held 
to  their  allegiance  they  might  hope  to  win  sympathy  across  the 
water.  The  Whig  statesmen,  from  Burke  to  Barre,  who  ap- 
proved America's  resistance  to  Grenville's,  Townshend's,  and 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  79 

North's  legislation,  were  a  unit  in  their  condemnation  of  seces- 
sion. "I  rejoice  that  America  has  resisted! "  cried  Pitt  in  the 
debate  on  the  repeal  of  the  Stamp  Act;  but  still  he  asserted 
in  1774  that  if  he  believed  the  Americans  entertained  "the  most 
distant  intention  of  throwing  off  the  legislative  supremacy  of 
Great  Britain/'  he  would  be  the  first  to  enforce  British  author- 
ity "by  every  effort  the  country  was  capable  of  making."  Some 
unforeseen  turn  of  affairs  might  at  any  moment  overthrow  the 
Tory  government  in  England  and  bring  the  friends  of  American 
rights  into  power.  It  had  happened  in  1765,  in  the  case  of 
Grenville  and  Rockingham,  with  the  glorious  result  of  the  re- 
peal of  the  Stamp  Act.  A  successor  to  Lord  North  might 
undo  the  Intolerable  Acts.  Anyway,  it  was  better  to  wait.  The 
population  and  wealth  of  the  colonies  were  growing  rapidly. 
If  separation  must  come,  the  longer  it  was  delayed  the  easier 
its  accomplishment  would  be. 

Such  considerations,  added  to  the  natural  inertia  of  a  pros- 
pering people,1  the  lack  of  a  definite  and  universal  mandate  to 
Congress  from  the  states,  and  the  serious  risk  involved  in  openly 
proclaiming  themselves  rebels,  make  it  a  wonder  rather  that 
independence  was  declared  at  all  than  that  it  was  declared  so 
late.  We  have  abundant  testimony  from  men  who  certainly 
would  not  overrate  the  amount  of  British  sympathy  in  the 
colonies  that  during  the  whole  of  the  war  at  least  one  third  of 
the  people  of  America  were  opposed  to  the  separation.  In 
New  York  and  some  of  the  Southern  states  the  Tories  were 
probably  in  the  majority.  Lecky,  in  an  oft-quoted  sentence, 
has  summed  up  the  situation  admirably:  "The  American  Rev- 
olution, like  most  others,  was  the  work  of  an  energetic 
minority  who  succeeded  in  committing  an  undecided  and  fluctu- 
ating majority  to  courses  for  which  they  had  little  love,  and 
leading  them  step  by  step  to  a  position  from  which  it  was 
impossible  to  recede." 

lfrhe  bishop  of  Derry  (Ireland)  in  a  curious  letter  to  Lord  Dartmouth, 
May  23,  1775,  declared  that  a  large  part  of  the  revolutionary  sentiment  in  the 
colonies  was  due  to  the  migration  from  Ireland,  within  a  few  years,  of  "over 
30,000  fanatical  and  hungry  republicans." 


8o  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  die  was  cast  on  July  2,  1776,  when  Congress  passed  Lee's 
motion  that  "  these  United  Colonies  are,  and  of  right  ought  to 
be,  free  and  independent  states ;  that  they  are  absolved  from  all 
allegiance  to  the  British  crown;  and  that  all  political  con- 
nection betweeen  them  and  the  state  of  Great  Britain  is,  and 
ought  to  be,  totally  dissolved."  Two  days  later,  Thomas  Jeffer- 
son's draft  of  a  "Declaration  of  Independence"  was  adopted.1 
It  was  based  on  the  political  doctrines  that  governments  exist 
by  the  consent  of  the  governed,  for  the  purpose  of  securing  to 
men  their  inalienable  rights  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness;  and  that  revolution  is  a  sacred  duty  when 
governments  seek  to  destroy  or  invade  those  rights.  It  was  an 
apology,  published  out  of  "a  decent  respect  for  the  opinions 
of  mankind,"  submitting  to  a  candid  world  the  proofs  of  a 
"long  train  of  abuses  and  usurpations"  practiced  by  George 
III  with  the  invariable  object  of  reducing  the  American 
colonies  to  a  state  of  "absolute  despotism."  It  was  a  final  and 
curt  repudiation  of  the  authority  of  Great  Britain,  and  a 
mutual  pledge  of  life,  fortune,  and  honor  to  maintain  the 
commonwealths  from  New  Hampshire  to  Georgia  as  free  and 
independent  states. 

The  Declaration  of  Independence  is  the  birth  certificate  of 
the  American  nation.  It  would  be  hard  to  exaggerate  its 

1The  Declaration  was  immediately  printed  by  order  of  Congress  and  sent  out 
to  the  various  states,  where  it  was  received  with  public  celebrations,  speeches, 
bonfires,  and  banquets.  A  copy  was  engrossed  on  parchment  and  signed  by  most 
of  the  members  of  Congress  on  August  2,  1776.  The  clerk  of  Congress,  in 
making  up  his  rough  records  for  July  4,  left  a  blank  space  into  which  there  was 
later  pasted  a  copy  of  the  engrossed  document  with  the  signatures  appended, 
and  this  was  then  written  into  the  corrected  minutes.  It  therefore  looked  as 
though  the  Declaration  had  been  adopted  and  signed  on  July  4,  1776.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  some  men  whose  names  appear  on  it  were  not  in  Congress  on  that 
date.  The  engrossed  parchment  with  original  signatures,  preserved  for  many 
years  in  the  building  of  the  Department  of  State  at  Washington,  was  transferred 
in  1921  by  an  Executive  order  to  the  Library  of  Congress.  Until  1894  it  was  on 
exhibition.  But  over  a  century's  exposure  to  the  light  wrought  such  damage  that 
the  cracked  and  faded  document  had  to  be  inclosed  in  a  steel  case.  In  1824  over 
two  hundred  facsimiles  were  made,  which  are  widely  distributed.  Several  drafts 
of  the  Declaration  in  Jefferson's  handwriting  are  also  preserved. 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  81 

influence  on  political  thought  throughout  the  civilized  world 
or  its  effect  on  the  immediate  situation  in  America  and  Eng- 
land. First  of  all,  it  cleared  the  air.  We  may  set  side  by  side 
the  testimony  of  a  patriot  of  Delaware  and  an  alderman  of 
London.  The  former  wrote  on  July  9:  "Now  we  know  what 
to  depend  on.  For  my  own  part,  I  have  been  at  a  great  stand. 
I  could  hardly  own  the  king  and  fight  against  him  at  the  same 
time.  But  now  heart  and  hand  shall  move  together.  I  do  not 
think  there  will  be  5  Tories  in  our  part  of  the  country  in 
10  days.  .  .  .  We  had  great  numbers  who  would  do  nothing  till 
we  were  declared  a  free  State,  who  now  are  ready  to  spend 
their  lives  and  fortunes  in  defence  of  our  country."  Two 
months  later,  William  Lee  wrote  from  London:  "The  Decla- 
ration of  Independence  has  totally  changed  the  nature  of  the 
contest.  It  is  now  on  the  part  of  Great  Britain  a  scheme  of 
conquest,  which  few  imagine  can  succeed.  Independence  has 
totally  altered  the  face  of  things  here.  The  Tories  .  . « .  hang 
their  heads  and  keep  a  profound  silence  on  the  subject.  The 
Whigs  do  not  say  much,  but  rather  seem  to  think  the  step  a 
wise  one  on  the  part  of  America,1  and  the  inevitable  conse- 
quence of  the  measures  taken  by  the  British  ministry."  It 
was  certain  that  imperial  unity  could  not  exist  with  full  liberty 
as  the  terms  "empire"  and  "liberty"  were  understood  on  either 
side  of  the  Atlantic  in  the  eighteenth  century.  In  trying  to 
keep  the  one  and  gain  the  other  the  colonists  exposed  them- 
selves to  those  charges  of  inconsistency  and  vacillation  which 
Thomas  Paine  so  mercilessly  pressed  home  in  "Common 
Sense."  But  now  all  ambiguity  was  at  an  end.  Protest,  ex- 
postulation, and  nullification  were  all  merged  in  the  single 
aim  of  vindicating  the  glorious  and  rebellious  Declaration  on 
the  field  of  battle. 

The  Declaration  also  marked  the  sharp  separation  of  the 
Tories  from  the  "patriots."  Till  now  the  former  had  been 

aThis  is  true  only  of  the  Rockingham  Whigs.  Fox  declared  that  the  "Ameri- 
cans had  done  no  more  than  the  English  did  against  James  II."  The  great 
majority  of  the  Whigs,  however,  both  the  "old  Whigs"  of  Burke  and  the  "new 
Whigs"  of  Chatham,  severely  reprobated  the  American  drift  toward  independence. 


82  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

lagging  brethren,  diverging  widely  in  their  judgment  as  to  how 
much  pressure  should  be  brought  to  bear  on  the  ministry  in 
London,  but  all  agreed  that  it  must  stop  short  of  rebellion. 
They  abhorred  treason  to  the  king ;  but  the  Declaration  made 
them  traitors  to  America.  Had  they  been  few  or  poor,  they 
might  have  been  treated  with  contemptuous  indifference,  but 
they  were  many  and  comprised  a  good  part  of  the  elite  of  the 
land — large  proprietors,  merchants,  lawyers,  college  presidents 
and  graduates,  ex-officers  of  the  crown,  and  practically  all  the 
Anglican  clergy.  The  Tories  who  were  not  fortunate  enough 
to  get  away  from  Boston  on  Howe's  ships,  or  to  be  under  the 
king's  protection  in  the  royal  armies  or  in  those  seaports  which 
were  held  by  British  garrisons  (Newport,  New  York,  Phila- 
delphia, Charleston,  Savannah),  fared  very  badly.  They  were 
tarred  and  feathered,  ridden  on  fence  rails,  robbed  of  their 
property,  and  branded  in  the  press  as  "  parricides  of  their 
country."  Washington,  from  whose  pen  the  last  phrase  came, 
wondered  why  "  persons  who  are  preying  on  the  vitals  of  their 
country  should  be  allowed  to  stalk  at  large,  whilst  we  know 
that  they  will  do  us  every  harm  in  their  power."  The  desperate 
state  of  the  patriot  cause  during  the  six  months  following  the 
Declaration  only  seemed  to  justify  the  prophetic  taunt  of  the 
Tories  that  the  American  colonies  had  cut  their  own  arteries 
in  severing  themselves  from  the  British  Empire  and  would 
soon  repent  the  repudiation  of  a  benevolent  king.  Bleeding 
feet,  tattered  coats,  and  empty  stomachs  were  poor  agents  of 
reconciliation  or  moderation.  The  patriots  who  did  not  desert 
under  such  trials  were  triply  steeled  in  their  determination  to 
confound  all  traitors. 

Finally,  the  Declaration  of  Independence  was  important  as 
a  stroke  in  diplomacy.  So  long  as  the  Americans  were  fighting 
to  coerce  Great  Britain  into  granting  concessions  which  would 
make  them  by  their  own  confession  dutiful  and  loyal  subjects 
of  King  George,  they  could  hardly  expect  the  aid  of  European 
countries.  France,  Spain,  and  Holland  were  not  interested  in 
the  reform  of  the  British  Empire — they  wanted  its  destruction. 
When  therefore  the  Congress  at  Philadelphia  announced  the 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  83 

secession  of  the  largest  and  richest  part  of  the  proud  empire, 
the  announcement  was  received  with  joy  at  the  courts  of  Europe. 
The  Declaration  itself,  to  be  sure,  was  not  enough  to  tempt 
France,  verging  as  she  was  toward  bankruptcy  and  revolu- 
tion, to  take  the  lead  publicly  in  building  up  a  coalition  of 
European  rivals  of  Britain's  imperial  power.  Another  year  and 
a  decided  American  victory  in  the  field  were  necessary  to  bring 
about  that  result.  But  from  the  moment  of  the  Declaration 
secret  aid  from  France  in  money,  arms,  and  clothing  was 
liberally  supplied,  with  the  connivance  of  the  ministers  of 
Louis  XVI.  The  French  government  allowed  and  even  en- 
couraged its  officers  to  solicit  commands  in  the  American  army. 
When  it  issued  orders  to  stop  ships  sailing  for  America  with 
contraband  goods,  it  supplied  supplementary  instructions  to 
make  their  escape  easy.  It  ostentatiously  forbade  the  use  of 
French  ports  to  American  privateers  while  privately  assuring 
the  American  agents  that  the  prize  courts  would  not  interfere 
with  "the  enjoyment  of  the  whole  harvest  of  plunder  upon 
British  commerce.'7  And  all  the  while,  the  French  foreign 
office  was  pledging  to  the  British  ambassador  "the  perfect  neu- 
trality and  pacific  intentions"  of  King  Louis's  government. 
Whether  or  not  the  American  army  could  have  held  together 
without  the  aid  of  France  we  cannot  tell,  for  we  cannot  set 
a  limit  to  the  tenacious,  patient  courage  of  George  Washington. 
The  judicious  Lecky  believed  that  most  of  the  American  states 
would  have  abandoned  the  struggle  without  this  help  from 
Europe,  and  that,  although  New  England  and  Virginia  might 
have  kept  up  a  local  warfare  for  a  time,  "the  peace  party 
would  have  soon  gained  the  ascendent  and  the  colonies  been 
reunited  to  the  mother  country." 

Washington's  army,  which  had  been  transferred  to  New 
York  after  the  British  evacuated  Boston,  heard  the  Declara- 
tion read  in  what  is  now  City  Hall  Square,  on  July  9,  and  hailed 
it  with  joy.  The  leaden  equestrian  statue  of  George  III  was 
thrown  down  to  be  melted  into  bullets,  and  the  king's  arms  on 
public  buildings  were  torn  down  and  burned  in  boisterous  bon- 
fires,— all  in  the  sight  of  General  Howe's  troops  on  Staten 


84  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Island.  In  the  dark  days  of  the  autumn  of  1776,  when  the 
American  hopes  seemed  to  have  faded  like  a  summer's  flower, 
when  Washington  was  reluctantly  withdrawing  his  dwindling 
army  across  the  state  of  New  Jersey  and  writing  that  the  game 
was  "pretty  well  up,"  when  no  friendly  foreign  power  had  as 
yet  taken  us  by  the  hand,  it  is  doubtful  whether  anything  else 
could  have  held  the  ill-kept  soldiers  and  the  despairing  states- 
men to  their  task  than  that  pledge  of  their  lives,  their  fortunes, 
and  their  sacred  honor  to  the  cause  of  independence. 

WAR  AND  PEACE 

More  than  a  year  passed  after  the  signing  of  the  Declaration 
of  Independence  before  there  was  much  likelihood  that  the 
American  states  would  succeed  in  assuming  that  "  separate  and 
equal  station  among  the  powers  of  the  earth"  to  which  they 
aspired.  Next  to  their  own  indomitable  leader,  the  patriot 
army  had  the  commander  of  the  British  forces  to  thank  that 
it  was  not  annihilated  in  any  one  of  a  half  dozen  desperate 
situations  in  which  it  found  itself  in  the  autumn  and  winter 
of  1776-1777.  Richard,  Lord  Howe,  admiral  in  the  British 
navy,  sailed  into  New  York  harbor  a  week  after  the  Declara- 
tion of  Independence  was  adopted,  bringing  reinforcements 
to  his  brother  William,  who  was  encamped  on  Staten  Island. 
When  the  forces  of  the  Howes  were  joined  by  Sir  Henry 
Clinton's  troops,  returning  from  an  unsuccessful  attack  on 
Fort  Moultrie  in  Charleston  harbor,  and  by  some  8000  German 
mercenaries  hired  from  the  princes  of  Anhalt,  Brunswick,  and 
Hesse,  there  were  nearly  35,000  soldiers  in  the  British  ranks — 
the  largest  army  gathered  on  American  soil  till  the  Civil  War- 

To  oppose  this  formidable  force  Washington  had  nominally 
about  18,000  men,  but  they  were  poorly  equipped  and  ill 
trained.  General  Israel  Putnam  with  8000  patriot  troops  forti- 
fied Brooklyn  Heights  and  tried  to  hold  Long  Island  against 
Howe ;  but  the  British  easily  outflanked  and  defeated  Putnam's 
advance  lines  under  Generals  Hull  and  Stirling  (August  27), 
and  Howe  had  the  Americans  completely  at  his  mercy  in  their 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  85 

trenches  at  Brooklyn.  All  he  had  to  do  was  to  send  a  warship 
into  the  East  River  and  shut  off  their  retreat  to  the  New  York 
side.  The  ferry  was  left  open,  however,  and  Washington  col- 
lected craft  of  all  sorts  along  the  shore  and  transported  his 
entire  army  to  the  Manhattan  side  under  the  cover  of  a  heavy 
fog.  Howe's  advance  pickets  arrived  at  the  water's  edge  in 
time  to  fire  a  few  scattering  volleys  at  the  vanishing  boats. 

This  amazing  apathy  of  General  Howe  was  of  a  piece  with 
his  conduct  for  the  next  ten  months.  He  followed  Washing- 
ton's army  more  like  a  detective  shadowing  a  suspected  crim- 
inal than  like  a  general  with  a  vastly  superior  army  seeking 
his  prey.  When  he  got  close  enough  to  the  patriot  army  to 
bring  it  to  bay,  as  at  Harlem  Heights  or  White  Plains,  he  was 
satisfied  with  inflicting  a  defeat  and  letting  the  Americans 
continue  their  retreat.  If  he  captured  the  garrisons  at  Forts 
Washington  and  Lee,  it  was  only  after  allowing  the  Americans 
plenty  of  time  to  abandon  the  strongholds  if  they  wished  to. 
When  he  was  leisurely  pursuing  the  dwindling  army  across  the 
state  of  New  Jersey,  he  timed  his  march  so  that  his  advance 
columns  entered  Trenton  just  as  Washington  had  got  his  last 
boatload  of  troops  across  the  Delaware  to  the  Pennsylvania 
side.  At  any  moment  of  the  five  months  (January  to  May, 
1777)  during  which  Washington's  army  of  never  more  than 
4000  men  lay  at  Morris  town,  New  Jersey,  in  winter  quarters, 
a  detachment  from  Howe's  army  at  New  York  or  Cornwallis's 
at  New  Brunswick  might  have  annihilated  the  patriots  and 
ended  the  war.  Washington  himself  wrote  in  March:  "If  the 
enemy  do  not  move,  it  will  be  a  miracle.  Nothing  but  ignorance 
of  our  numbers  and  situation  can  protect  us."  But  Howe  was 
ignorant  of  neither,  and  yet  he  did  not  move.  Desertions  from 
Washington's  army  were  constant.  The  New  Jersey  farmers 
who  defended  their  cattle,  chickens,  and  vegetables  against  the 
patriot  scouts,  in  order  that  they  might  sell  them  at  high  prices 
in  hard  gold  to  the  British  in  New  York,  could  give -their 
customers  all  the  information  they  wished. 

The  plain  fact  is  that  the  commander  of  King  George's 
forces  in  America  did  not  wish  to  conquer  the  Americans  by 


86  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  sword.  He  was  a  Whig,  although  the  king's  cousin,  and  he 
had  promised  his  constituents  at  Nottingham  that  he  would  not 
fight  to  subdue  the  people  whom  Burke  and  Chatham  lauded. 
He  was  the  brother  of  the  valiant  George  Howe,  who  had  fallen 
in  Abercrombie's  ill-fated  attack  on  Ticonderoga  (1758)  and 
whose  monument  in  Westminster  Abbey  had  been  built  by  the 
grateful  generosity  of  the  colony  of  Massachusetts.  He  was 
himself  a  veteran  of  the  French  wars  in  America,  having  com- 
manded a  regiment  at  Louisburg  (1758)  and  climbed  the  steep 
path  of  the  Anse  de  Foulon  in  the  vanguard  of  Wolfe's  band 
of  volunteers  for  the  surprise  of  the  pickets  at  Quebec.  He 
and  his  brother  Lord  Richard  bore  the  commission  from  the 
king  to  pardon  the  Americans  individually  and  collectively  on 
their  return  to  allegiance  to  the  crown.1  This  olive  branch 
Howe  carried  in  his  right  hand,  the  sword  in  his  left.  He  be- 
lieved that  the  great  majority  of  Americans  were  really  loyal 
to  the  king,  but  had  been  led  astray  by  demagogues  and  fire- 
brands. He  thought,  not  without  reason,  that  the  patriot  army 
would  disintegrate,  composed  as  it  was  of  shifting  levies  of 
militia,  while  the  people  of  New  Jersey  and  the  other  central 
states  flocked  in  increasing  numbers  to  the  Tory  camp.  Some 
3000  had  accepted  the  royal  proclamation  of  pardon  in  De- 
cember, 1776,  and  were  carrying  the  certificates  of  loyalty 
snugly  in  their  coat  pockets  to  frighten  off  any  British  or 
Hessian  raiders. 

Whether  Howe's  conduct  is  to  be  explained  by  his  own 
amiable  indolence  or  by  the  complication  of  British  politics, 
it  was  of  utmost  service  to  the  patriot  cause.  He  spared  Wash- 
ington's army  until  the  sentiment  of  independence  had  taken 
deep  root  in  America ;  until  the  new  state  governments  were 


1  After  the  battle  of  Long  Island,  Lord  Richard  sent  General  Sullivan  to  Con- 
gress to  ask  for  a  conference.  Franklin,  Adams,  and  Rutledge  went  to  his  head- 
quarters on  Staten  Island  and  were  regaled  on  his  excellent  mutton  and  claret, 
but  came  to  no  terms.  Howe  expressed  his  regret  that  he  had  not  arrived  in 
America  before  July  4.  When  he  spoke  of  his  reluctance  to  conquer  the  Ameri- 
cans, Franklin  replied,  "We  will  do  our  utmost  to  save  your  lordship  that 
embarrassment." 


THE  WAR  IN 
THE  NORTH 

69°        1775-1776 


HoweJs  and  Clinton's  March,  1776-1778 
Washington's  March,  1776-1778 
Sullivan's  March,  1778 
Burgoyne's  March,  1777 
St.Leger's  March, 1777 

80°          Lonfiritude 


THE  REVOLUTIONARY  WAR  IN  THE  CENTRAL  ATLANTIC  STATES, 

1776-1778 


88  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

established ;  until  Congress  was  converted  to  the  raising  of  a 
standing  army  and  so  confirmed  in  its  confidence  in  the  great 
commander  as  to  give  him  almost  dictatorial  power  in  the 
appointment  of  officers  and  the  management  of  the  war ;  until 
our  persistent  solicitations  resulted  in  secret  gifts  of  clothing, 
guns,  and  money  from  France.  No  wonder  that  the  patriot 
officers  drank  healths  to  General  Howe !  And  no  wonder  that 
the  American  Tories  (except  those  who  profited  by  the  favors 
of  his  entourage)  condemned  him  as  the  marplot  who  was 
spreading  rebellion  in  the  delusion  that  he  was  encouraging  rec- 
onciliation.1 The  American  army  suffered  many  an  anxious 
hour  and  many  a  humiliating  defeat  after  the  amiable  Howe 
departed,  but  these  defeats  did  not  mean  the  collapse  of  the 
American  cause.  Even  among  the  snows  of  Valley  Forge  the 
presence  of  Lafayette,  Steuben,  and  Pulaski  was  a  visible  proof 
that  the  cause  of  the  American  patriots  was  becoming  the  cause 
of  Europe.  The  moment  for  the  British  government  to  have 
crushed  the  American  Revolution  was  when  the  army  of  crude 
militia  levies  was  barely  holding  together  in  its  long  season  of 
retreats,  when  the  distracted  Congress  had  fled  from  its  hall  in 
Philadelphia,  and  when  the  new  states  were  still  dallying  with 
" provisional"  governments,  only  half  convinced  that  the  Decla- 
ration of  Independence  was  wholly  wise.2  That  moment  General 
Howe  let  pass,  and  it  never  came  again. 

1  Howe  was  invested  with  the  order  of  the  Knights  of  the  Bath  in  March,  1777, 
for  his  sterile  victory  on  Long  Island  the  year  before.    Judge  Jones,  the  Tory 
historian  of  New  York,  with  bitter  sarcasm,  called  the  decoration  "  the  reward  for 
evacuating  Boston,  for  lying  indolent  upon  Staten  Island  for  near  two  months, 
for  suffering  the  whole  rebel  army  to  escape  from  him  on  Long  Island  and  again 
at  White  Plains,"  etc.    That  Howe  had  some  support  in  Parliament  is  beyond 
doubt.    Arthur  Johnson  of  Canada,  in  his  "Myths  and  Mythmakers  of  the 
American  Revolution,"  attributes  the  success  of  the  Americans  to  the  encourage- 
ment which  they  received  from  the  English  Whigs.    A  few  days  before  the  fall 
of  Lord  North  (March,  1782)  a  Tory  member  of  the  Commons,  named  Onslow, 
said  in  defense  of  the  prime  minister,  "Why  have  we  failed  so  miserably  in  this 
war  against  America,  if  not  from  the  support  and  countenance  given  to  rebellion 
in  this  very  house  ! " 

2  The  state  governments  formed  by  Massachusetts,  New  Hampshire,  and  Vir- 
ginia before  the  Declaration  was  adopted  were  only  temporary.    New  Jersey, 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  89 

Only  a  single  positive  achievement  broke  the  monotonous) 
course  of  defeats  and  retreats  for  the  patriot  army  in  the  year  I 
that  followed  the  Declaration  of  Independence.  After  havingj 
escaped  from  Howe  on  Long  Island,  Washington  had  been 
forced  to  evacuate  New  York,  which  remained  in  the  hands  of 
the  British  during  the  entire  war.  Four  thousand  prisoners  of 
war  went  with  the  city,  and  other  thousands  were  captured 
when  the  forts  on  the  Hudson  were  forced  to  capitulate.  Vainly 
summoning  the  insubordinate  Charles  Lee  from  the  Highlands 
of  the  Hudson  to  reenforce  his  shrinking  army,  Washington 
fell  back  across  the  state  of  New  Jersey  to  a  position  behind  the 
Delaware,  while  Howe  spread  out  his  forces  in  a  line  of  posts 
reaching  from  Perth  Amboy  through  Trenton  and  Bordentown. 
Thousands  of  the  inhabitants  of  New  Jersey  accepted  the 
certificates  of  loyalty  eagerly  distributed  by  the  Howes.  Con- 
gress fled  to  Baltimore,  and  the  people  of  Philadelphia  awaited 
with  indifference  the  establishment  of  a  British  garrison.  Then 
Washington  turned  like  a  wounded  animal  at  bay.  While  he 
still  had  the  remnants  of  an  army,  and  before  the  river  froze 
solid  to  give  the  British  access  to  the  "capital  city,"  he  crossed 
to  the  Jersey  side  late  on  Christmas  night  and  fell  upon  the 
Hessians  at  Trenton  in  the  midst  of  their  holiday  revels.  A  com- 
plete victory,  a  thousand  prisoners,  and  the  consternation  of  the 
British  line  through  New  Jersey  were  the  rewards  of  his  ex- 
ploit. Cornwallis,  just  about  to  embark  for  England,  hastened 
to  repair  the  disaster.  But  Washington  outwitted  and  eluded 
him,  defeated  three  British  regiments  at  Princeton,  and  sent  the 
bewildered  Cornwallis  back  in  panic  to  protect  his  stores  at 
New  Brunswick.  In  a  ten  days'  campaign  Washington  had  re- 
covered the  state  of  New  Jersey.  He  led  his  soldiers  into  their 
precarious  winter  quarters  at  Morristown  with  a  glorious 

on  the  very  day  of  the  vote  in  Congress  on  independence,  published  a  constitu- 
tion which  was  to  be  "provisional  in  case  of  reconciliation  with  Great  Britain." 
It  was  not  till  1777  that  state  governments  were  established,  with  severe  test 
laws  compelling  their  citizens  to  swear  that  the  war  with  Great  Britain  was  just 
and  necessary  and  to  transfer  their  allegiance  from  King  George  to  the  new 
state  authorities. 


90  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

memory  to  sustain  them  in  the  midst  of  privation  and  hunger. 
It  was  the  most  critical  action  of  the  war,  for  it  meant  life  or 
((death  to  the  American  cause.  It  was  also  the  one  military 
<  achievement  of  Washington's  that  ranks  him  with  the  great 
(masters  of  strategy.  It  won  the  praise  of  the  greatest  soldier 
of  the  age,  Frederick  of  Prussia,  and  it  remained  in  the  mind  of 
Lord  Cornwallis  to  the  end  of  the  war.  Five  years  later,  when  he 
surrendered  at  Yorktown,  Cornwallis  gracefully  complimented 
Washington  on  his  "unsurpassed"  performance  in  New  Jersey. 
When  Washington  emerged  from  his  quarters  at  Morristown 
in  May,  1777,  with  ranks  swollen  to  some  11,000  by  the  spring 
levies,  the  plan  was  already  taking  shape  in  the  British  councils 
which  was  to  decide  the  issue  of  the  war.  It  was  an  involved 
plan,  complicated  by  a  lively  exchange  of  letters  and  orders 
between  the  generals  in  America  and  the  ministry  in  London ; 
and  it  is  still  the  subject  of  a  voluminous  literature  of  incrimi- 
nation  and  justification.  The  upshot  of  it  was  that  General 
John  Burgoyne  with  an  army  of  8000  men  should  come  down 
from  Canada  via  Lake  Champlain  and  the  upper  Hudson  valley, 
while  St.  Leger,  operating  from  Lake  Ontario  via  Fort  Stanwix 
(Rome)  and  the  Mohawk,  should  join  him  at  Albany,  and 
General  Howe  should  proceed  from  New  York  up  the  Hudson 
to  receive  these  supporting  armies.  The  British  forces  thus 
concentrated,  and  in  possession  of  the  entire  Hudson-Champlain 
line,  could  turn  east  or  south  to  crush  the  rebellion.  As  the 
British  already  had  control  of  the  Hudson  up  to  the  Highlands, 
it  is  difficult  to  see  how  Washington  could  have  done  more  than 
to  follow  Howe  with  such  harassing  rear  attacks  as  he  dared  to 
hazard.  What  was  his  surprise  to  learn,  just  as  the  messages 
reached  him  that  Burgoyne  was  well  started  .on  his  march,  that 
Howe's  great  fleet  was  sighted  off  the  lower  New  Jersey  coast, 
bearing  to  the  south.  Howe  had  left  only  6000  men  behind  in 
New  York  under  Sir  Henry  Clinton. 

What  Howe's  motive  was  in  thus  "deserting"  Burgoyne  at 
the  critical  moment  we  do  not  know.  Only  worse  confusion 
comes  of  reading  the  reports  of  the  investigation  of  the  con- 
duct of  both  the  generals  at  the  bar  of  Parliament  in  1779 — 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  91 

an  investigation  suddenly  stopped  for  political  reasons.  But 
whether  it  was  lack  of  definite  instructions  from  England,  or 
the  belief  that  Burgoyne's  army  was  able  to  take  care  of  itself, 
or  an  exaggerated  idea  of  the  importance  of  taking  the  "rebel 
capital"  of  Philadelphia,  or  the  desire  to  end  the  war  in  the 
Middle  States  before  the  Tory  general,  Burgoyne,  should  have 
time  to  gather  laurels,  or  a  mixture  of  all  these  motives,  that 
determined  Howe  to  go  south  instead  of  north,  the  result  of  his 
move  was  the  disruption  of  the  British  Empire  in  America. 
Washington  could  not  prevent  Howe  from  occupying  and  hold- 
ing Philadelphia,  in  spite  of  his  brilliant  resistance  at  Brandy- 
wine  Creek  (September  n)  and  his  attack  on  German  town 
(October  4).  But  Howe's  success  was  dearly  paid  for.  Three 
days  after  the  battle  of  Germantown  Burgoyne  abandoned  his 
hope  of  reaching  Albany.  In  the  three  months  since  he  had  left 
Ticonderoga  with  his  heavily  equipped  regulars  and  his  elabo- 
rate baggage  trains  he  had  covered  only  seventy -five  miles  of  the 
rough,  wooded  country  of  upper  New  York.  The  farmers  from 
all  over  New  England  had  shouldered  their  flintlock  muskets  and 
hastened  to  join  the  forces  gathering  on  his  flank.  By  the  first 
of  September  there  were  10,000  troops  with  Schuyler,  Gates, 
and  Arnold,  and  in  another  month  the  numbers  had  almost 
doubled.  "Wherever  the  king's  forces  point,"  wrote  Burgoyne 
in  despair,  "militia  to  the  number  of  3000  or  4000  assemble  in 
a  few  hours."  He  tried  to  beat  them  off  by  brave  attacks  be- 
fore Saratoga  and  Stillwater,  but  they  were  too  many  for  him. 
On  October  7  he  was  so  roughly  handled  by  Arnold  and  Morgan 
at  the  battle  of  Freeman's  Farm  that  he  abandoned  his  forward 
march.  Ten  days  later,  despairing  of  help  from  either  Carleton 
on  the  north  or  Clinton  on  the  south,  he  surrendered  to  General 
Gates  the  5000  men  that  were  left  of  his  army. 

The  loss  of  an  army,  "surrendered  to  poltroons  and  cowards 
incapable  of  fighting,"  as  Burgoyne's  British  critics  persisted 
in  calling  the  American  militia,  was  the  least  of  the  calamities 
that  Saratoga  spelled  for  the  British  cause.  Burgoyne  sur- 
rendered in  October.  In  November,  Congress  adopted  the 
Articles  of  Confederation — a  constitution  binding  the  states 


92  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

together  in  "a  perpetual  union."  In  December  the  news  of  the 
surrender  reached  France  and  induced  the  court  to  make  a  for- 
mal treaty  of  alliance  with  the  United  States.  It  was  signed 
on  February  6,  1778.  In  a  desperate  effort  to  prevent  the  con- 
flict in  America  from  widening  into  a  European  coalition,  Lord 
North  had  introduced  into  Parliament  a  Conciliatory  Act,  re- 
pealing the  tea  tax  of  1767  and  the  Intolerable  Acts  of  1774 
and  authorizing  a  commission  to  sail  for  America  to  negotiate 
the  return  of  the  revolting  colonies  to  the  empire.  The  terms 
to  be  offered  removed  every  abuse  against  which  the  Americans 
had  protested  since  the  Grenville  legislation. 

This  simultaneous  movement  of  France  and  Great  Britain 
toward  a  closer  union  with  the  rebel  states  across  the  ocean 
was  the  most  significant  diplomatic  event  of  the  Revolution.  It 
put  America  in  a  favored  position  which  her  astute  minister  at 
Paris,  Benjamin  Franklin,  was  not  slow  to  improve.  He  could 
speak  with  mock  anxiety  of  the  possibility  that  America  might 
be  obliged  to  consider  England's  offer  unless  more  help  were 
forthcoming  from  Europe,  and  could  work  on  Vergennes's  fears 
that  the  success  of  the  English  commission  would  mean  the 
triumph  of  the  Whigs,  in  whose  eyes  France  and  not  America 
was  the  great  enemy.  "The  power  that  recognizes  American 
independence  will  gather  all  the  fruits  of  this  war,"  wrote  Ver- 
gennes.  Great  Britain  was  willing  to  concede  everything  but 
independence.  France  outbid  her,  offering  the  aid  necessary 
to  the  establishment  of  complete  independence  and  granting, 
besides  recognition,  a  favorable  treaty  of  commerce.1 

America  eagerly  welcomed  the  alliance  with  France  in  spite 
of  Tory  tales  to  the  effect  that  the  country  would  be  overrun 
with  Roman  priests  and  that  rosaries,  relics,  racks,  and  thumb- 
screws, with  bales  of  "papistical  tracts,"  were  coming  in  the 

1On  the  basis  of  material  lately  discovered  in  the  Paris  archives  Professor 
Van  Tyne  has  shown  that  French  agents  in  London  warned  their  government 
that  the  American  states  were  ready,  in  return  for  the  acknowledgment  of  their 
independence,  to  join  with  England  in  an  attack  on  the  French  West  Indies.  It 
was  probably  to  frustrate  such  a  move,  he  believes,  that  the  French  government 
agreed  to  the  treaty  of  alliance  with  the  United  States  in  February,  1778. 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  93 

holds  of  King  Louis's  ships.  What  did  come  was  powder,  lead, 
and  gold.  All  told,  between  1778  and  1781  France  furnished  us 
all  our  naval  strength,  half  our  land  forces,  and  equipment  and 
stores  of  incalculable  value.  Her  intervention  in  our  behalf 
cost  her  over  1,000,000,000  francs.  In  return  we  promised  to 
make  no  terms  with  Great  Britain  short  of  the  recognition  of 
our  independence  and  to  continue  the  war  against  the  British 
Empire  until  our  ally  should  be  ready  to  make  peace.  It  was  the 
only  treaty  of  alliance  that  the  United  States  ever  made,  and, 
as  the  sequel  will  show,  it  cost  us  much  embarrassment  until 
we  were  relieved  of  it  by  Napoleon  Bonaparte  in  1801.  A  ro- 
mantic interest  attaches  to  the  reception  by  Congress,  on 
August  6,  1778,  of  the  first  accredited  foreign  minister  to  the 
United  States,  M.  Gerard,  bearing  a  letter  from  Louis  XVI  to 
his  "very  dear  great  friends  and  allies."  It  was  the  formal 
entrance  of  America  into  the  family  of  nations. 

The  humiliation  at  Saratoga,  the  rejection  of  the  Conciliatory 
Acts,  and  the  conclusion  of  the  French  alliance  brought  about 
a  decided  change  in  the  conduct  of  the  war.  England  cast 
aside  the  olive  branch  and  transferred  the  sword  from  her  left 
hand  to  her  right.  Revolt  against  her  authority  was  one  thing, 
but  a  treaty  of  alliance  with  her  old  enemy  France  was  insult 
added  to  injury  and  obstinacy.  The  punishment  should  be 
swift  and  unsparing.  Clinton  and  Cornwallis  never  had  more 
than  a  third  of  the  splendid  army  which  the  Howes  brought  to 
New  York  in  the  summer  of  1776;  but  they  now  used  their 
troops  as  the  Howes  never  did.  They  sent  out  detachments  in 
every  direction  to  terrorize  the  country  by  savage  raids.  The 
theater  of  the  war  was  changed  too.  Until  now  (except  for 
Clinton's  futile  expedition  against  Charleston  in  1776)  all  the 
fighting  had  been  in  the  Northern  states,  but  after  1778  it  was^ 
all  south  of  the  Potomac.  The  British  held  Newport  until  late 
in  1 779  and  New  York  until  the  close  of  the  war,  while  Washing- 
ton lay  with  his  army  for  three  years  strongly  intrenched  in  the 
Highlands  of  the  Hudson.  He  never  met  Clinton  in  battle, 
and  in  fact  fought  no  important  engagement  at  all  between 
Monmouth  (June,  1778)  and  Yorktown  (October,  1781). 


94  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

In  transferring  the  seat  of  the  war  to  the  South  the  British 
ministers  and  generals  were  making  a  fresh  start.  They  would 
crush  the  rebellion  by  detaching  the  great  lower  states  one  by 
one  from  the  Union,  from  Georgia  up  to  Virginia.  Savannah 
was  taken  December  29,  1778,  with  all  its  ammunition,  stores, 
and  shipping.  The  patriot  officials  were  driven  from  the  state  of 
Georgia  along  with  the  patriot  militia.  The  old  colonial  govern- 
ment was  reestablished  and  Georgia  was  formally  declared  by 
Parliament  to  be  out  of  the  rebellion.  In  May,  1780,  the 
British  brought  a  fleet  and  army  down  from  New  York  and 
reduced  Charleston,  the  richest  seaport  of  the  South.  With 
the  town  of  Charleston,  General  Benjamin  Lincoln  surrendered 
2500  colonial  troops,  practically  the  whole  American  army 
south  of  the  Potomac.  Henceforth  Cornwallis  could  move  where 
he  would.  He  began  his  march  through  the  interior  of  the 
Carolinas,  expecting  the  tens  of  thousands  of  Loyalists  in  those 
states  to  flock  to  his  banners,  as  the  patriots  of  New  York  and 
New  England  had  flocked  to  the  banners  of  Schuyler,  Gates, 
and  Arnold  at  Saratoga. 

But  Cornwallis  discovered  what  all  the  British  commanders 
learned,  that  while  it  was  easy  to  hold  the  seaport  towns  with 
the  support  of  the  British  fleet,  the  inland  and  upland  regions 
escaped  his  control.  It  was  not  Tories  but  patriot  farmers, 
hunters,  and  wood-rangers  from  both  sides  of  the  Appalachian 
Mountains  who  swarmed  around  Colonel  Ferguson  at  King's 
Mountain  (October  7,  1780)  and  nearly  exterminated  his  de- 
tachment of  Loyalist  militia.  The  "affair"  at  King's  Moun- 
tain struck  terror  into  the  army  of  Cornwallis:  " There  is 
scarcely  an  inhabitant  between  the  Santee  and  the  Pedee  who 
is  not  in  arms  against  us,"  he  wrote.  He  tarried  at  Wilmington 
to  repair  the  morale  of  his  troops,  while  fresh  thousands  joined 
the  guerrilla  leaders  of  the  patriots.  After  a  year's  hard  cam- 
paigning by  detachments  between  the  yellow  rivers  which  slant 
lazily  across  the  Carolinas,  Cornwallis  found  himself  in  the 
summer  of  i78i.just  where  he  had  been  in  the  summer  of  1780 ; 
namely,  in  control  of  the  seaboard.  Even  the  patriot  governor 
and  legislature  of  Georgia  had  been  restored. 


THE  REVOLUTIONARY  WAR  IN  THE  WEST  AND  SOUTH,  1778-1781 


96  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Not  that  the  American  cause  was  in  a  flourishing  state.  The 
same  spring  which  was  to  open  the  last  year  of  actual  warfare 
(1781)  marked  in  some  respects  the  epoch  of  deepest  dejection 
and  gloom  for  the  patriots.  The  brilliant  Arnold,  his  vanity 
wounded  by  the  " ingratitude"  of  Congress  and  flattered  by  the 
solicitations  of  Tory  friends,  had  attempted  to  deliver  over  the 
stronghold  of  West  Point  (and  therewith  the  Hudson  and 
Washington's  army)  to  General  Clinton.  Continental  currency 
was  so  worthless  that  unless  some  gold  could  be  secured  from 
France,  Congress  would  cease  to  be  able  to  purchase  any 
supplies  or  even  hire  transportation  for  those  which  it  com- 
mandeered. The  calls  for  enlistments  in  the  continental  army 
went  unheeded,  and  the  regiments  already  enlisted  began  to 
show  signs  of  mutiny  for  lack  of  food  and  pay.  The  pathetic  and 
the  humorous  are  strangely  blended  in  the  fortunes  of  the  army 
in  those  closing  months  of  the  war :  Washington  riding  to  Hart- 
ford to  meet  Rochambeau  for  a  ceremonious  welcome  to  the 
French  troops  in  the  summer  of  1780  without  money  enough 
to  pay  the  tavern  bills  of  his  suite;  Morgan  capitalizing  the 
cowardice  of  the  raw  militia  at  Cowpens  (January  17,  1781) 
by  ordering  them  to  fire  two  volleys  and  run  to  the  rear — warn- 
ing the  regulars  not  to  disturb  them  when  they  should  see  them 
flying  past;  Greene's  troops  at  Eutaw  Springs  (August,  1781) 
literally  in  rags,  and  sometimes  even  in  Adam's  garb  of  foliage, 
their  distracted  commanders  writing,  "Turn  what  way  you 
will  .  .  .  ruin  is  in  every  form  and  misery  in  every  shape." 

Yet  in  spite  of  suffering  and  poverty,  the  situation  was  not 
so  desperate  as  in  1776.  Cornwallis  might  detach  the  states 
south  of  Virginia,  but  the  North  was  safe.  The  most  England 
could  hope  for  was  to  limit  independence  to  New  England 
and  the  Middle  States.  Furthermore,  the  maritime  powers  of 
Europe  were  growing  more  and  more  determined  that  England 
should  not  win  the  war.  Spain  had  joined  France  in  1779,  and 
the  next  year  Holland  came  into  the  coalition  against  "the 
tyrant  of  the  seas";  while  Russia,  Denmark,  and  Sweden 
formed  the  league  of  "armed  neutrality"  to  enforce  the  doc- 
trine that  "free  ships  make  free  goods."  In  India,  in  the 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  97 

Mediterranean,  in  the  West  Indies,  and  on  the  high  seas  Eng- 
lish soldiers  and  sailors  were  contending  against  the  powers 
of  Europe.  The  Whigs  in  Parliament  were  clamoring  to  have 
the  war  in  America  ended,  in  order  that  Great  Britain  might 
concentrate  her  attack  on  her  ancient  enemies,  France  and 
Spain.  Finally,  the  French,  whose  military  and  naval  aid  had 
thus  far  been  unfruitful,1  might  at  any  moment  furnish  just 
the  help  necessary  to  turn  the  scale  and  win  the  war. 

In  January,  1781,  Congress,  at  Washington's  request,  sent 
Colonel  John  Laurens  as  special  envoy  to  France  to  represent 
our  deplorable  situation  and  urge  immediate  aid.  The  appeal 
was  not  in  vain.  King  Louis  sent  over  an  army  of  7000  men 
with  Admiral  De  Grasse,  and  2,000,000  francs  in  gold.  General 
Rochambeau,  who  had  been  lying  inactive  at  Newport  for  a 
year,  joined  Washington  at  White  Plains  (July  6),  and  De 
Grasse  sent  word  from  the  West  Indies  that  he  could  spare  his 
ships  for  a  while  to  cooperate  with  the  troops  on  the  coast.  It 
was  too  good  an  offer  to  miss.  At  first  Washington  wanted  to 
attack  New  York,  but  a  better  opening  presented  itself.  Corn- 
wallis,  whose  plans  grew  more  grandiose  as  his  means  dwindled, 
had  conceived  the  idea  of  reducing  the  rich  and  populous  state 
of  Virginia  by  a  series  of  raids  like  those  conducted  in  the 
Carolinas.  He  boasted  that  he  would  drive  out  "that  boy" 
Lafayette,  who  was  in  command  of  a  small  army  in  the  state. 
But  Lafayette  outmaneuvered  him  in  Virginia  as  Green  had 
done  in  the  Carolinas,  and  Cornwallis  returned  as  usual  to 
the  coast,  establishing  himself  in  the  peninsula  between  the 
York  and  the  James  Rivers,  at  Yorktown.  The  strategy  was 
excellent  so  long  as  he  had  the  support  of  the  British  fleet,  as  at 

1The  French  fleet,  on  whose  cooperation  any  hope  of  driving  the  British  from 
the  coast  towns  depended,  was  ordered  to  operate  in  the  West  Indies  and  give 
only  its  spare  time  to  the  American  coast.  The  result  was  that  there  could  be  no 
effective  support  of  the  land  forces.  D'Estaing  happened  always  to  arrive  just 
too  late  or  to  depart  just  too  early  to  prevent  the  embarkation  of  Clinton's 
troops  or  to  intercept  British  transports  bearing  provisions  and  reinforcements. 
The  Virginia  assembly  petitioned  in  vain  for  French  ships  to  guard  the  entrance 
to  Chesapeake  Bay,  for  example,  at  the  time  of  Arnold's  raid  on  the  state 
(April,  1781). 


98  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Savannah  and  Charleston;  but  he  had  moved  so  far  up  the 
coast  that  the  only  naval  help  that  could  reach  him  quickly 
would  have  to  come  from  Clinton  at  New  York.  Washington's 
clear  eye  saw  the  situation  at  a  glance.  He  sent  a  swift  ship  to 
the  West  Indies  to  beg  De  Grasse  to  hasten  to  the  capes  of 
Chesapeake  Bay,  while  he  and  Rochambeau,  after  a  feint  on 
New  York  to  keep  Clinton  anxious,  marched  rapidly  from  the 
Hudson  to  the  head  of  Chesapeake  Bay  and  there  embarked 
for  the  Yorktown  peninsula.  Du  Barras  brought  the  siege 
artillery  from  Newport  in  another  French  fleet.  All  the  difficult 
maneuvers  were  executed  with  precision  and  success.  When 
the  British  admiral  Graves  arrived  from  New  York,  he  found 
the  French  in  possession  of  the  entrance  to  Chesapeake  Bay 
and  his  own  fleet  too  weak  to  dislodge  them.  Cornwallis  was 
in  the  trap.  The  superior  forces  of  Americans  and  French 
drew  their  siege  lines  closer  and  closer  about  his  position,  and 
on  October  19,  1781,  he  surrendered  his  army  of  7000  men. 

Cornwallis's  capitulation  at  Yorktown,  like  Burgoyne's  at 
Saratoga,  was  humiliating,  but  not  irretrievable.  It  need  not 
have  ended  the  war.  In  fact,  neither  the  American  commander 
nor  the  British  monarch  thought  that  it  would.  Washington 
began  to  lay  his  plans  for  an  attack  on  New  York  or  Charleston 
when  the  British  fleet  should  return  from  the  Indies  for  its  next 
summer  vacation  on  the  American  coast;  and  George  III,  in 
his  speech  from  the  throne  on  the  opening  of  Parliament 
(November  27,  1781),  talked  confidently  of  continuing  the 
struggle.  Still  the  WThig  motion  to  conclude  peace  with 
America  and  turn  the  whole  power  of  Britain  against  the 
European  coalition  was  lost  only  by  the  rather  close  vote  of 
179  to  220.  A  few  weeks  later,  when  the  French  had  captured 
the  island  of  St.  Eustatius  in  the  West  Indies  and  the  Spaniards 
and  French  had  taken  Minorca  in  the  Mediterranean,  the  same 
motion  was  defeated  by  only  a  single  voice  in  Parliament.  On 
March  20,  1782,  Lord  North,  after  a  valiant  but  reluctant 
struggle  of  twelve  years  to  maintain  the  high  Tory  policy  of 
George  III,  resigned  the  British  government  into  the  hands  of 
the  Marquis  of  Rockingham.  Clinton  was  immediately  recalled 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  99 

from  New  York,  and  his  place  taken  by  Sir  Guy  Carleton,  a 
friend  of  conciliation  like  the  Howes.  Emissaries  were  sent 
to  both  Vergennes  and  Franklin  in  Paris  to  sound  them  on 
terms  of  peace. 

The  British  ministry  tried  hard — especially  after  the  death 
of  Rockingham,  in  July,  1782,  brought  to  the  premiership  Lord 
Shelburne  of  the  imperial  school  of  Chatham — to  arrange  a 
peace  without  granting  American  independence.  They  were 
willing  to  give  France  concessions  in  India  to  detach  her  from 
the  American  alliance,  and  to  grant  the  Americans  everything 
that  they  had  asked  of  Parliament  since  1763.  But  it  was  in 
vain.  Neither  Vergennes  nor  Franklin,  neither  the  American 
Congress  nor  any  of  the  states,  would  agree  to  the  terms.  Even 
Holland,  which  had  recognized  us  as  a  nation  in  April,  1782, 
and  received  our  envoy  John  Adams  as  minister  at  The  Hague, 
would  not  make  a  separate  peace  with  England  except  on  the 
basis  of  American  independence.  When  the  British  govern- 
ment had  finally  conceded  this  main  point,  however,  the 
American  commissioners  (Franklin,  Adams,  and  Jay)  were 
less  scrupulous  about  carrying  out  to  the  letter  another  article 
of  our  treaty  of  1778  with  France.  We  had  promised  not  to 
make  peace  until  our  ally  should  be  ready,  and  the  American 
Congress  instructed  our  commissioners  to  respect  this  promise. 
But  when  it  was  evident  that  France  was  delaying  the  peace  in 
order  to  get  advantages  for  her  ally  Spain  which  did  not  con- 
cern us  (Gibraltar  and  Florida),  and  which  were  entirely 
foreign  to  the  avowed  object  of  the  treaty  of  1778,  our  com- 
missioners matched  subtlety  against  subtlety  in  proceeding 
alone  with  the  negotiations  with  Great  Britain.  It  took  a  good 
deal  of  apologetic  flattery  from  Franklin 's  suave  pen  to  pla- 
cate Vergennes;  but  the  Americans  had  their  way,  and  on 
November  30,  1782,  the  preliminaries  of  peace  were  signed 
at  Paris.1 

xThe  American  commissioners  have  received  much  censure  for  breaking  the 
letter  of  the  treaty  after  all  the  aid  that  we  had  received  from  France;  and  it 
took  considerable  persuasion  on  the  part  of  John  Jay  (besides  the  breaking  of  the 
famous  clay  pipe)  to  win  Franklin  over  to  the  policy  of  a  separate  negotiation. 


100  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  wildest  patriot  enthusiast  could  not  claim  that  we  had 
" beaten"  Great  Britain.  We  had  checked  her  raids  in  the 
interior  of  the  states  and  contributed  valuable  strategic  advice 
and  brave  troops  to  the  French  forces  which  had  compelled 
Cornwallis  to  surrender  at  Yorktown.  The  indispensable  naval 
contingent  at  Yorktown  was  entirely  French,  and  a  majority 
of  the  besieging  troops  under  Washington's  supreme  command 
were  also  French.  Yet  the  terms  of  peace  which  we  obtained 
could  not  have  been  more  favorable  if  we  had  humbled  the 
British  Empire  to  the  dust.  In  addition  to  our  independence, 
we  secured  the  Mississippi  as  our  western  boundary,1  the 
right  to  share  in  the  fisheries  of  Newfoundland,  and  immunity 
from  further  responsibility  toward  the  thousands  of  Loyalists 
whose  property  had  been  confiscated  than  a  recommendation 
by  Congress  that  the  states  should  put  no  obstacle  in  the  way 
of  the  recovery  of  such  property  through  their  courts. 

The  disproportionate  success  of  our  diplomacy  and  our  arms 
was  due  to  several  causes :  the  astuteness  and  firmness  of  our 
commissioners  at  Paris,  the  bad  situation  of  the  British  fleet 
in  the  West  Indies  before  the  news  of  the  victory  of  Rodney 

But  it  must  also  be  said  that  the  French  were  attempting  to  break  the  treaty 
in  spirit  by  prolonging  the  war,  to  America's  detriment,  after  the  object  of  the 
treaty,  the  independence  of  America,  was  secured.  Spain  was  not  our  ally  but 
France's.  We  were  not  bound  to  jeopardize  our  fortunes  for  the  sake  of  Spam's 
ambitions,  and  we  had  no  part  in  the  promises  made  by  France  to  Spain. 
1Some  historians  have  attributed  England's  acceptance  of  the  Mississippi 
rather  than  the  Alleghenies  as  our  western  boundary  to  George  Rogers  Clark's 
wonderful  conquest  of  the  Northwest  in  1778-1779.  Certainly  that  feat  deserved 
the  winning  of  an  empire.  But  there  is  little  evidence  that  it  affected  the  negotia- 
tions at  Paris,  nor  does  Clark's  name  even  appear  among  the  documents. 
The  simple  fact  ^ems  to  be  that  England,  having  given  up  the  colonies,  had 
little  interest  in  tjhe  wilderness  behind  them.  The  story  of  Clark's  deeds — his 
embassy  to  Governor  Patrick  Henry  to  secure  aid  for  the  recovery  of  Virginia's 
chartered  domain  from  the  British  and  the  removal  of  the  Indian  danger  from 
the  frontier  settlements ;  his  expedition  down  the  Ohio  and  his  surprise  of  the 
forts  on  the  Mississippi  (Kaskaskia  and  Cahokia)  with  only  a  handful  of  men  ; 
his  masterful  dominion  over  the  Indians  and  the  half-breeds  ;  and  finally  his 
march  of  over  two  hundred  and  thirty  miles  in  the  dead  of  winter  (February, 
1779)  across  the  southern  end  of  Illinois  and  through  the  icy  waters,  neck  deep, 
of  the  "drowned  lands"  of  the  Wabash  valley,  to  surprise  the  British  commander 
at  Vincennes — is  the  most  dramatic  chapter  of  our  Revolutionary  history. 


Augustine 

Boundary  conceded  by  Great  Britain 

in  1783 
—  —  —  Boundaries  proposed  by  the  French 

Court  in  1782 
Fur  posts  held  by  English  until  1796 


THE  UNITED  STATES  BY  THE  TREATY  OF  1783 


102  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

over  De  Grasse  in  the  spring  of  1782  restored  confidence  in 
London,  and  the  anxiety  of  the  new  Whig  ministry  to  keep 
in  power  by  a  triumph  over  the  European  coalition  against 
Great  Britain.  The  Whigs  indulged  America  to  an  extent  that 
made  England  seem  rather  our  ally  against  France  than  the 
common  enemy  of  France  and  us.  "The  English  do  not  make 
the  peace,  they  buy  it,"  cried  Vergennes  in  amazement.  A  free 
America  the  French  wished  to  see  as  one  of  the  fragments  of 
a  dismembered  Britain;  a  powerful  America  was  no  part  of 
their  plan.  Vergennes  tried  to  confine  the  new  United  States 
to  a  narrow  strip  of  land  between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  sea 
(see  map,  p.  101).  He  tried  to  balance  concessions  for  his 
ally  Spain  against  America's  demands  for  fishing-rights  off 
Newfoundland.  He  urged  the  British  government  to  insist  on 
indemnification  for  the  Tories.  But  it  was  all  in  vain.  The 
stars  in  their  courses  fought  for  America;  and  the  French 
were  compelled  to  be  even  a  greater  help  to  us  in  the  victory 
of  peace  than  in  the  stress  of  war.  Vergennes  might  have  antic- 
ipated George  Canning  by  forty  years,  and  with  greater  truth 
have  exclaimed  (but  more  in  regret  than  in  exultation),  "I  called 
the  new  world  into  existence  to  redress  the  balance  of  the  old." 
On  April  19,  1783,  the  eighth  anniversary  of  the  battle  of 
Lexington,  Washington  read  to  his  troops  the  proclamation 
of  Congress  ordering  the  cessation  of  hostilities;  and  the  "em- 
battled farmers"  returned  to  their  homes,  often  begging  their 
bread  on  the  way,  to  hang  their  rude  weapons  over  the  kitchen 
mantle  as  souvenirs  for  their  prosperous  grandchildren  to  show 
with  pride  and  gratitude.  The  definitive  treaty  of  peace  was 
signed  September  3,  1783,  and  a  few  weeks  later  Carleton 
sailed  down  the  harbor  of  New  York  with  the  garrison  which 
had  occupied  the  city  for  seven  years.  Washington  took  an 
affectionate  farewell  of  his  officers  at  Fraunces'  Tavern  and 
embarked  at  the  Battery  for  the  Jersey  shore.  He  stopped 
at  Annapolis,  Maryland,  where  about  a  score  of  the  members 
of  Congress  were  assembled.  In  a  simple  speech  he  laid  down 
the  command  which  he  had  borne  with  such  skill  and  patience 
through  eight  years  of  trial;  then  he  returned  to  his  beloved 


THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION  103 

acres  at  Mount  Vernon.  "I  have  retired  from  all  public  em- 
ployments/' he  wrote  to  his  dear  friend  Lafayette,  "and  shall 
tread  the  paths  of  private  life  with  heartfelt  satisfaction.  .  .  . 
I  shall  move  gently  down  the  stream  of  life  until  I  sleep  with 
my  fathers." 

So  the  second  of  the  two  unequal  periods  of  our  colonial 
history  came  to  an  end.  From  1607  to  1763  we  were  slowly 
builded  into  the  great  British  empire.  In  the  score  of  years  that 
followed  ( 1 763-1 783 )  we  threw  off  our  allegiance  to  this  empire, 
appealing  from  an  England  ill  administered  and  inquisitorial  to 
the  ideals  of  the  commonwealth  heralded  by  Milton,  Sidney,  and 
Locke.  This  short  period  of  our  revolt  against  England  has 
been  celebrated  as  the  birth  of  the  American  nation.  But  it  is 
evident  that  the  long  century  and  a  half  of  incubation  under 
English  rule  must  have  affected  our  national  character  far  more 
deeply  than  the  comparatively  brief  hour  of  revolution.  Even 
to  this  day  our  law,  in  the  absence  of  any  positive  statute,  is 
the  common  law  of  England;  our  government,  local  and 
general,  our  judicial  procedure  and  administration,  even  our 
religious,  philosophical,  educational,  and  literary  habits  and 
models,  are  still,  in  spite  of  influences  exerted  by  an  enormous 
immigration  from  the  continent  of  Europe,  predominantly  Eng- 
lish. Magna  Carta  and  the  Bill  of  Rights  are  the  basis  of  Ameri- 
can as  well  as  of  English  liberties.  Shakespeare,  Newton,  and 
Chatham  are  in  a  far  more  intimate  way  ours  than  are  Goethe, 
Mirabeau,  or  Garibaldi.  The  Revolution  was  at  bottom  a  civil 
struggle  between  two  political  ideals  that  had  torn  the  Eng- 
lish race  since  the  days  of  Queen  Elizabeth — prerogative 
against  democracy,  or  the  inherited  right  of  a  family,  a  caste, 
against  the  inherent  right  of  the  man  and  citizen.  The  success 
of  the  American  cause  was  the  vindication  (as  salutary  for 
England  as  for  us)  of  the  more  liberal  ideal.  It  was  the  an- 
nouncement, in  the  words  of  John  Adams,  "that  a  more  equal 
liberty  than  has  prevailed  in  other  parts  of  the  earth  must 
be  established  in  America."  Our  national  history  has  been 
true  to  our  national  ideal  and  a  blessing  to  the  world  so  far, 
and  only  so  far,  as  it  has  vindicated  this  prophecy. 


CHAPTER  III 
FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT 

That  which  man  changeth  not  for  the  better,  time  changeth  for  the  worse. 
—  LORD  BACON 

THE  CONFEDERATION 

The  United  States  of  America,  whose  entrance  into  the 
family  of  nations  was  formally  recognized  by  the  treaty  of 
1783,  contained  a  population  of  about  three  and  a  quarter 
millions,  divided  almost  equally  by  Mason  and  Dixon's  line.1 
Although  the  Mississippi  was  the  western  boundary  of  the 
country,  all  but  a  very  small  and  venturesome  fraction  of 
the  American  people  lived  in  the  commercial  towns  along  the 
Atlantic  coast  or  on  farm  lands  and  plantations  accessible 
by  the  rivers  which  cut  the  shore  line  at  frequent  intervals  from 
the  Penobscot  to  the  Savannah.  Behind  the  Appalachian  ridge 
the  forests  of  hickory,  oak,  and  sycamore,  which  shaded  the 
rich  soil  of  the  eastern  Mississippi  basin,  were  only  just  waking 
to  other  sounds  than  the  bellowing  of  the  buffalo  bull  and  the 
scream  of  the  wild  turkey — to  the  ring  of  the  frontiersman's 
ax  on  the  edge  of  the  clearing  and  the  crack  of  his  rifle  bring- 
ing down  the  buck  at  the  salt  lick  or  the  stealthy  Indian 
his  cabin  door.  A  few  thousand  men  had  followed  Boone, 
der,  Robertson,  and  Harrod  across  the  mountains  into  the 
(wilderness,  where  clusters  of  huts  marked  the  sites,  but  gave 
Kttle  promise  of  the  growth,  of  the  great  cities  of  the  West— 

census  of  the  United  States,  taken  in  1790,  shows  some  interest- 
ing figures.  "Virginia  leads  the  list  of  states,  with  a  population  (747,610)  almost 
double  that  of  her  nearest  rival,  Pennsylvania  (434,373).  Then  follow  North 
Carolina  ( !)  with  397,751,  Massachusetts  with  378,789,  New  York  with  340,120, 
Maryland  with  319,728,  and  South  Carolina  with  240,073.  These  first  seven 
states  of  1790  rank  in  the  census  of  1920  respectively:  20,  2,  14,  6,  i,  28,  26. 

104 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        105 

Pittsburgh,  Cincinnati,  Louisville,  St.  Louis,  Nashville.  Be- 
yond the  Mississippi  Spain's  title  began,  but  the  land  was  as 
strange  as  the  fairy  kingdoms  in  her  tales.  "Now  and  then," 
says  McMaster,  "some  weather-beaten  trapper  came  from  it 
to  the  frontiers  of  the  states  with  stories  of  great  plains  level 
as  a  floor,  where  the  grass  grew  higher  than  the  waist,  where 
the  flowers  were  more  beautiful  than  the  best-kept  garden, 
where  trees  were  never  seen,  and  where  the  Indians  still  looked 
on  the  white  man  as  a  god."  Florida  too  was  Spanish,  with 
the  whole  shore  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  Great  Britain  arbi- 
trarily held  the  important  fur  posts  on  the  southern  shores  of 
the  Great  Lakes  as  pledges  for  the  debts  which  American 
customers  owed  to  her  merchants.  The  new  United  States, 
then,  was  practically  a  strip  seldom  more  than  two  hundred 
miles  wide  along  the  Atlantic  border  from  Maine  to  Georgia. 
A  generation  was  to  pass,  filled  with  struggles  with  England, 
France,  and  Spain  for  the  security  of  our  "natural  borders" 
and  the  freedom  of  our  trade,  before  Americans  could  turn  with 
absorbing  seriousness  to  the  extension  of  their  population,  their 
capital,  and  their  government  into  the  great  domain  which 
they  had  acquired  with  their  independence. 

An  overwhelming  majority  of  the  people  were  cultivators 
of  the  soil.  They  had  the  manners,  morals,  and  social  outlook 
of  the  farmer.  Their  needs  were  simple  and  self-supplied, 
their  horizon  narrow,  their  virtues  homely,  and  their  character 
robust.  The  refinements  of  life — art,  letters,  music,  learn- 
ing— were  rare,  as  they  are  in  every  community  whose  surplus 
of  leisure  and  wealth  is  small.  Benjamin  Franklin,  to  be  sure, 
wrote  at  the  founding  of  the  American  Philosophical  Society 
in  1743,  "The  first  drudgery  of  settling  the  new  colonies  is 
pretty  well  over,  and  there  are  many  in  every  colony  in  cir- 
cumstances which  set  them  at  ease  to  cultivate  the  finer  arts 
and  improve  the  common  stock  of  knowledge."  But  these  are 
the  optimistic  words  of  an  exceptional  scholar  in  exceptional 
surroundings  of  his  own  creation.  The  Revolutionary  War 
stimulated  industry,  making  imperative  the  casting  of  cannon, 
the  manufacture  of  powder,  the  weaving  of  cloth  for  blankets, 


io6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

uniforms,  and  sails,  the  construction  of  wagons  and  gun- 
carriages  ;  but  all  this  was  forced  and  premature.  Laborers  were 
as  yet  too  few  and  capital  was  too  scanty  (even  when  encour- 
aged by  bounties  from  the  states)  to  exploit  the  wealth  of  raw 
material  in  field,  mine,  and  forest  on  which  our  later  prosperity 
was  based.  Consequently,  there  were  no  great  and  teeming 
industrial  centers  to  draw  our  people  apart  to  the  poles  of 
luxury  and  want.  If  wealth  was  modest  it  was  also  fairly 
evenly  distributed.  Our  foreign  visitors  in  the  later  years  of 
the  eighteenth  century  testify  almost  unanimously  to  the  gen- 
eral diffusion  of  a  modest  well-being  through  the  states. 

Nor  should  the  destitution  of  Washington's  army  at  Valley 
Forge  or  the  wailings  of  a  poverty-stricken  Congress  mislead 
us  as  to  the  degree  of  that  well-being.  A  rich  country  may 
refuse  to  support  its  government,  as  France  did  on  the  eve  of 
its  great  revolution ;  and,  conversely,  a  government  may  revel 
in  wealth  squeezed  from  its  millions  of  poor  subjects,  as  in  a 
Turkey  or  a  Persia.  There  never  was  a  doubt  in  Washington's 
mind  of  the  ability  of  the  states  to  support  an  army  many 
times  the  size  of  the  one  which  he  commanded.  He  complained 
over  and  over  again  of  the  lack  of  public  spirit,  of  the  jealousy 
of  each  state  and  each  section  of  the  country  for  its  own  safety 
and  prosperity,  of  the  greed  of  the  farmers  who  sold  their 
abundant  crops  to  the  British  invader  while  the  patriot  army 
starved,  of  the  absorption  of  the  merchants  in  their  unwonted 
profits  from  privateering,  of  the  speculators  who  were  "  preying 
on  the  vitals  of  this  great  country."  After  the  first  few  months 
of  the  war  New  England  was  virtually  free  from  British  moles- 
tation, as  were  the  Middle  States  after  1 778.  The  Carolinas  were 
not  seriously  disturbed  until  the  end  of  1779,  nor  was  Virginia 
until  the  beginning  of  1781.  This  desultory  character  of  the 
British  attack  gave  ample  chance  for  most  of  the  sections  of 
our  seaboard  to  enjoy  a  flourishing  commerce  with  the  ports 
of  Europe,  to  which  Congress  opened  our  harbors  on  the  out- 
break of  hostilities.  To  be  sure,  British  cruisers  were  lurking 
off  the  New  England  coast  and  Chesapeake  Bay,  but  the 
Yankee  skippers  ran  the  "blockade"  with  daring  and  success. 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        107 

Moreover,  French  and  British  gold  was  brought  to  America 
in  such  quantities  as  to  swell  the  currency  beyond  anything 
known  in  the  colonial  period ;  and,  with  the  new  commerce,  this 
created  the  beginnings  of  that  merchant  power  in  the  North 
and  planter  aristocracy  in  the  South  whose  influence  in  the 
new  government  was  to  be  felt  presently. 

If  we  ask  why  the  moderate  but  sufficient  resources  of  our 
country  were  not  put  at  the  disposal  of  the  general  government 
during  the  war  and  the  years  immediately  following,  the  answer 
is  that  the  general  government  had  neither  the  authority  nor 
the  respect  to  command  those  resources.  The  Continental  Con- 
gress was  not  a  sovereign  body,  but  only  a  group  of  delegates 
sent  from  the  colony-states  as  a  central  committee  of  safety, 
a  kind  of  " steering  committee"  for  the  war.  It  did  not  enact 
laws,  but  only  made  recommendations  which  the  states  might 
enact  into  laws.  It  suggested  military  plans  and  requested  con- 
tributions from  the  states  for  the  support  of  the  army  and  the 
maintenance  of  diplomatic  agents.  It  even  acted  on  the  in- 
struction of  the  colonies  in  introducing  the  Declaration  of 
Independence.  The  war  was  virtually  over  before  Congress 
had  any  legal  standing  or  defined  powers;  that  is,  before  it 
was  formally  made  a  " government"  by  the  thirteen  states 
(March  i,  1781). 

Union  is  now  an  ideal  as  precious  to  us  as  its  companion 
ideals  in  our  political  trinity — Liberty  and  Democracy.  Con- 
sequently, it  is  a  tempting  theory  to  see  in  the  Continental  Con- 
gress what  Professor  Burgess  has  called  "the  first  organization 
of  the  American  state,"  and  to  attribute  to  it  authority  over  the 
state  governments,  as  Webster  and  Lincoln  did.  But  the  men 
of  the  Revolutionary  era  did  not  regard  Congress  in  this  light. 
When  allegiance  to  Great  Britain  was  severed,  even  though 
that  action  was  proclaimed  by  Congress  and  not  by  the  several 
states,  it  was  nevertheless  to  the  states  and  not  to  Congress 
that  the  new  allegiance  was  thought  to  be  due.  James  Madison, 
in  1782,  declared  that  it  was  "extravagant"  to  maintain  that 
"the  rights  of  the  British  crown  devolved  on  the  Continental 
Congress."  The  states  exercised  various  acts  of  sovereignty 


io8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

during  the  war  and  for  some  time  after.  They  coined  money 
and  issued  bills  of  credit ;  they  built  navies  and  raised  armies ; 
they  sought  to  negotiate  loans  with  foreign  powers;  they  con- 
sulted Congress  as  a  kind  of  advisory  board  only  and  rejected 
its  recommendations  without  any  thought  of  "  rebellion."  When 
New  Hampshire  refused  to  let  her  militia  serve  outside  her 
borders,  when  Connecticut  designated  herself  "a  free  and  in- 
dependent state,"  when  Virginia  ratified  the  treaty  of  1778 
with  France  and  discussed  with  Spain  the  desirability  of  their 
providing  for  a  joint  protection  of  their  trade  by  the  establish- 
ment of  a  fort  on  the  Virginia  border,  when  South  Carolina 
explicitly  conferred  on  her  government  the  right  to  make  war 
and  negotiate  treaties,  when  all  the  states  levied  tariffs,  laid  em- 
bargoes, paid  or  refused  to  pay  their  assessments  by  Congress 
at  will,  it  is  evident  that  there  was  no  "national  state"  but  only 
thirteen  states  with  a  common  "diplomatic  body"  at  Philadel- 
phia, and  that  "Union  meant  for  the  time  being  only  a  prudent 
intercolonial  cooperation."1 

But  if  there  was  no  national  state  during  the  Revolutionary 
period,  there  was  nevertheless  an  American  nationality.  The 
political  machinery  lagged  behind  the  conscious  unity  of  pur- 
pose. A  common  language  and  law,  a  common  republican  form 
of  government,  a  common  grievance — all  tended  toward  a 
formal  union.  The  protest  against  the  Stamp  Act,  the  sympathy 
for  Massachusetts  under  the  Intolerable  Acts,  the  petitions  and 
apologies  sent  to  the  king  and  Parliament,  the  Declaration 
of  Independence,  were  all  the  work  of  united,  not  separate, 
colonies.  When  Patrick  Henry  exclaimed  in  the  first  Continen- 
tal Congress,  "I  am  not  a  Virginian,  I  am  an  American ! "  and 
when  John  Adams  said  in  1778,  "The  Confederacy  is  to  make 
us  one  individual  only,"  they  were  speaking  under  the  spell  of 
the  new  nationality.  A  few  men  from  the  beginning  saw  the 
promise  of  a  new  national  state  to  emerge  from  the  common 

1The  phrase  is  Professor  Van  Tyne's  in  "The  American  Revolution"  (Ameri- 
can Nation  Series),  p.  182.  It  was  John  Adams  who  called  the  Continental  Con- 
gress a  "diplomatic  body."  Thomas  Jefferson,  in  his  "Summary  View"  (1774), 
called  the  Congress  about  to  assemble  the  king's  "great  American  Council." 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        109 

struggle  and  the  common  aim,  but  it  took  the  bitter  experience 
of  years  of  confusion,  impotence,  and  anarchy  under  the  old 
Confederation,  after  the  war  was  over,  to  convince  even  a 
moderate  majority  of  the  voters  of  the  United  States  of  the 
desirability  of  a  real  national  state. 

Various  suggestions  of  colonial  union  had  been  made  in  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  with  the  primary  pur- 
pose of  defense  against  the  Indians  and  the  French.  The 
British  government,  however,  had  frowned  upon  such  plans, 
seeing  in  them  a  danger  to  the  authority  of  the  royal  governors. 
Immediately  after  the  Revolutionary  War  broke  out,  and  a  year 
before  independence  was  declared,  Ttpnjftrpin  Franklin 


posed  to  Congress  a  plan  of  intercolonial  union,  not  unlike  his 
Albany  Plan  of  1754,  except,  of  course,  that  the  executive  power 
was  not  to  be  vested  in  an  English  governor-general.  The  colo- 
nies were  to  form  a  "league  of  friendship  for  the  common  de- 
fense and  general  welfare."  They  were  to  elect  annually 
congress  which  was  to  have  authority  to  declare  and  conduct 
war,  to  make  appointments  to  all  general  offices,  to  settle  dis- 
putes between  the  colonies,  to  regulate  commerce  and  the  cur- 
rency. It  was  just  at  the  moment  when  the  colonies  were  being 
transformed  into  states,  and  they  were  not  ready  to  commit 
themselves  to  it.  Franklin  did  not  urge  the  plan  further. 

However,  the  necessity  for  some  kind  of  legal  authority  in 
the  central  government  grew  as  the  war  progressed.  When  Lord 
North  sought  to  conciliate  the  colonies  separately  in  the  spring 
of  1775,  Jefferson,  in  behalf  of  the  Virginia  assembly,  addressed 
Governor  Dunmore  as  follows:  "We  are  now  represented  in  a 
general  Congress  by  members  approved  by  the  House,  where 
the  former  union  [of  1774]  it  is  hoped  will  be  so  strongly 
cemented,  that  no  partial  application  can  produce  the  slightest 
departure  from  the  common  cause.  We  consider  ourselves  as 
bound  in  honor  as  well  as  interest  to  share  one  general  fate  with 
our  sister  Colonies,  and  we  should  hold  ourselves  to  be  base 
deserters  of  that  union  to  which  we  have  acceded,  were  we  to 
agree  to  any  measures  distinct  and  separate  from  them."  John 
Adams  confessed  a  little  later  that  the  states  could  not  exist 


no  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

alone,  but  must  "raise  an  empire  of  permanent  duration."  The 
words  " union"  and  " empire"  are  doubtless  used  in  a  very 
general  sense  in  these  passages ;  they  do  not  necessarily  imply 
either  an  elaborate  constitution  or  a  highly  centralized  author- 
ity. But  they  do  show  how  necessary  some  sort  of  central 
authority  was  in  the  eyes  of  leading  statesmen.  Certainly,  after 
the  war  as  well  as  during  the  war,  nobody  expected  or  wished 
to  see  the  "general  government"  disappear.  It  was  only  a 
question  of  what  share  of  power  should  be  given  to  it  and  what 
share  retained  by  the  states.  In  other  words,  it  was  the  old 
problem  of  reconciling  local,  inherited,  and  jealously  guarded 
power  with  a  new  and  delegated  authority  whose  scope  could 
not  easily  be  forecast. 

The  proposal  for  union  was  revived  with  the  agitation  for 
independence.  Lee's  famous  motion  of  June  7,  1776,  not 
only  declared  that  "these  colonies  are,  and  of  right  ought  to 
be,  free  and  independent  states"  but  also  proposed  that  a 
Confederation  be  formed  "to  bind  the  colonies  more  closely 
together."  A  committee  of  thirteen  (one  from  each  of  the 
colonies)  was  chosen  to  draft  articles  of  union.  The  com- 
mittee was  too  large,  and  except  for  a  few  men  (Dickinson, 
Sherman,  Samuel  Adams,  Rutledge)  it  was  far  inferior  to  the 
contemporaneous  committee  of  five  elected  to  prepare  the  Decla- 
ration of  Independence.  The  strenuous  business  of  keeping 
the  army  together  for  the  first  two  years  of  the  war  prevented 
Congress  from  giving  very  serious  consideration  to  the  articles 
drafted  by  Dickinson.  "They  were  debated  from  time  to  time," 
says  Jefferson  in  his  "Autobiography."  On  November  17,  1777, 
Congress,  taking  advantage  of  the  enthusiasm  of  the  country 
over  Burgoyne's  surrender,  submitted  the  Articles  of  Confeder- 
ation to  the  states  for  ratification.  A  translation  into  French 
was  made  in  order  to  help  win  the  alliance  for  which  we  had 
been  striving  since  the  beginning  of  the  war.  Ten  of  the  states 
had  ratified  the  Articles  by  the  midsummer  of  177.8,  New  Jersey 
and  Delaware  following  within  a  few  months.  But  Maryland, 
for  reasons  which  we  shall  notice  presently,  withheld  her  con- 
sent until  March  1,1781.  Since  the  consent  of  all  the  states  was 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        in 

necessary  to  put  the  Articles  intg  operation,  we  had  no  general 
government  based  on  a  written  constitution  until  thirty-three 
weeks  before  the  surrender  of  Cornwallis  at  Yorktown. 

It  is  customary  for  historians  to  dwell  on  the  weaknes 
the  Arfolps  of  rnr)fpHpra,t,inn  :  the  absence  of  any  national  exec- 
utive to  act  directly  on  the  people  of  the  states,  the  failure  to 
secure  to  Congress  the  taxing-power  and  the  regulation  of  com- 
merce, the  lack  of  a  permanent  national  judiciary  extending  to 
all  parts  of  the  country,  the  impossibility  of  commanding  the 
respect  of  the  countries  abroad  when  disobedience  and  defiance 
marked  the  conduct  of  the  states  at  home.  The  decade  oj 
anarchy  and  impotence  in  the  national  government  which 
elapsed  between  the  drafting  of  the  Articles  and  the  summons 
of  the  Constitutional  Convention  only  too  amply  illustrated 
those  faults.  But  for  all  that,  the  Articles  were  a  very  decided 
step  toward  unity.  The  Confederation  which  they  established, 
despite  its  defects,  was  the  closest  and  most  uniform  that  the 
world  had  ever  seen.  Many  of  the  provisions  of  the  Articles 
were  taken  over  bodily  into  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States.  Those  which  were  most  constructive  were  the  pledge 
of  a  common  defense  (Art.  Ill) ;  the  complete  exchange  of 
privileges  and  immunities  between  the  free  inhabitants  of  all  the 
states  (Art.  IV) ;  the  restrictions  on  the  sovereignty  of  the 
states,  requiring  the  consent  of  Congress  for  alliances,  limiting 
armaments,  and  prohibiting  legislation  in  conflict  with  the 
treaties  made  by  Congress  (Art.  VI) ;  the  grant  of  definite  and 
very  considerable  powers  to  Congress,  such  as  the  declaration  of 
war,  the  borrowing  of  money,  the  settlement  of  interstate  dis- 
putes, the  regulation  of  currency  and  of  weights  and  measures, 
the  administration  of  Indian  affairs  and  the  post  office,  etc. 
(Art.  IX) ;  the  assumption  of  all  obligations  for  paper  money 
issued  and  of  all  debts  contracted  by  the  Continental  Con- 
gress. So  formidable,  in  fact,  did  these  powers  seem  to  the 
statesmen  of  the  time  that  they  feared  that  the  states  would 
be  swallowed  up  in  the  national  government.  "If  the  plan 
now  proposed  should  be  adopted,"  wrote  Edward  Rutledge 
of  South  Carolina,  "nothing  less  than  the  ruin  of  some  of  the 


H2  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

colonies  will  be  the  consequence.  ...  I  am  resolved  to  vest 
the  Congress  with  no  more  power  than  is  absolutely  necessary, 
and,  to  use  a  familiar  expression,  to  keep  the  staff  in  our  own 
hands."  Governor  Cooke  of  Rhode  Island,  for  fear  the  state 
should  be  considered  to  have  surrendered  any  of  its  sovereignty, 
significantly  called  the  Articles  "the  Treaty  of  the  Confeder- 
ation." With  such  sentiments  abroad,  the  wonder  is  that  the 
Articles,  even  with  their  concession  of  an  equal  vote  to  each 
state,  of  the  immunity  of  commerce  from  the  central  control, 
and  of  requisitions  on  the  states  in  place  of  taxation  for  raising 
national  funds,1  were  ratified  at  all. 

Only  eight  years  after  their  adoption  the  Articles  of  Con- 
federation were  superseded  by  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States.  From  the  point  of  view  of  constitutional  history,  there- 
fore, their  importance  is  slight.  How  much  their  very  existence 
contribute^,  however,  to  the  peaceful  evolution  of  the  Consti- 
tution, which  reconciled  the  clashing  interests  of  the  states 
instead  of  "leaving  their  correction  to  insurrection  and  civil 
war,"  we  cannot  tell.  One  supreme  service  the  Articles  did  for 
the  cause  of  the  Union  :  they  secured  the  immense  tract  of  land 
between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  Mississippi  as  a  national  do- 
main. As  the  chief  factor  in  the  consolidation  of  our  federal 
government,  from  New  York's  cession  of  her  Western  claims  to 
Congress  in  1780  down  to  Panama's  cession  of  the  canal  strip 
in  1904,  has  been  the  extension  of  the  national  authority  over 
our  new  territories  or  colonies,  it  is  worth  while  to  dwell  briefly 
on  the  origin  of  our  national  domain. 

The  charters  of  the  colonies  of  Virginia,  Massachusetts,  Con- 
necticut, Carolina,  and  Georgia  granted  them  indefinite  west- 
ward extension,  in  profound  ignorance  of  the  width  of  the 


student  will  note  that  the  struggle  between  the  advocates  of  a  central 
government  and  the  champions  of  states'  rights  was  a  repetition  of  the  struggle 
between  the  colonists  and  the  British  government  which  led  to  the  Revolution. 
In  the  eyes  of  the  states'-rights  men  like  Rutledge,  Patrick  Henry,  Mason, 
and  Gerry,  the  whole  process  of  centralization  in  our  government,  which  ended 
in  the  Constitution  and  the  ten-year  rule  of  the  Federalist  party,  was  a  work 
of  "imperial  organization"  quite  parallel  to  that  pursued  by  the  ministers  of 
George  III  from  Grenville  to  Lord  North. 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        113 

American  continent.  The  other  colonies  were  less  fortunate. 
Either  their  western  boundary  was  specified  in  their  charter 
(Pennsylvania,  Maryland)  or  they  were  backed  against  another 
colony  to  the  west  (Rhode  Island,  New  Jersey,  Delaware). 
After  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  British  govern- 
ment sought  to  silence  these  claims  of  the  "sea  to  sea"  charters 
of  the  Stuart  period.  The  Board  of  Trade  prompted  the  dele- 
gates to  the  Albany  Congress  of  1754  to  propose  that  "the 
bounds  of  those  colonies  which  extend  to  the  South  Sea  be 
contracted  and  limited  by  the  Alleghany  or  Appalachian  moun- 
tains"; and  Benjamin  Franklin  admitted  that  those  colonies 
ought  to  be  reduced  "to  dimensions  more  convenient  for  the 
common  purposes  of  government."  Immediately  on  the  close  of 
the  French  wars,  King  George  by  royal  proclamation  forbada 
the  colonists  to  extend  their  settlements  beyond  the  ridge  of  the] 
Alleghenies  (October  7,  1763).  The  proclamation  was  non 
obeyed,  for  the  adventurous  frontiersmen  of  the  back  countryj 
of  Virginia  and  the  Carolinas  were  little  minded  to  abandon  the 
fine  hunting-grounds  of  the  West  to  the  Indians.  Before  a 
decade  had  elapsed  Daniel  Boone  and  James  Robertson  were 
piloting  their  bands  through  the  rich  lands  south  of  the  Ohio. 
All  the  Western  territory  north  of  the  Ohio,  in  which  Virginia, 
New  York^  Massachusetts,  and  Connecticut  had  claims,  was 
incorporated  into  the  province  of  Quebec  by  an  act  of  Parlia- 
ment (1774)  which  was  denounced  by  the  £rst  Continental 
Congress  as  "impolitic,  unjust,  and  cruel,  as  well  as  unconsti- 
tutional and  most  dangerous  and  destructive  of  American 
rights." 

The  Revolutionary  War  wiped  out  the  Proclamation  Line 
of  isjL&g^md  the  Quebec  Act  of  1 774,  but  left  the  vexing  question 
of  who  inherited  the  extinguished  British  sovereignty  between 
the  Alleghenies  and  the  Mississippi.  Did  that  authority  re- 
vert to  the  states  by  their  old  "sea  to  sea"  charters?  If  so, 
Virginia  would  become  half  a  continent,  with  lands  and  wealth 
ample  to  pay  her  war  debts,  whereas  the  states  without  west- 
ward extension  would  'have  to  resort  to  heavy  .taxation.  It 
seemed  unfair,  when  the  cause  for  which  they  had  fought  the 


114  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

war  was  a  common  cause.  Yet  Congress  had  to  insist  on  the 
charter  claims  when  dealing  with  England,  because  to  relin- 
quish them  would  be  to  acknowledge  England's  right  to  dispose 
of  the  back  lands  in  the  peace  negotiations.  On  the  other  hand, 
to  say,  after  the  peace  was  made,  that  the  authority  of  England 
in  the  West  devolved  upon  the  Congress  would  give  to  that  body 
a  power  that  very  few  men  in  America  were  ready  to  accord  at 
that  time. 

The  debates  in  Congress  on  this  dilemma  were  lively.  Chase 
of  Maryland  said:  "No  colony  has  a  right  to  go  to  the  South 
Sea :  ...  It  would  not  be  safe  for  the  rest."  But  the  Virginia 
delegates  replied:  "What  security  have  we  that  Congress  will 
not  curtail  the  present  settlements  of  the  States?  .  .  .  Vir- 
ginia owns  to  the  South  Sea ;  you  shall  not  pare  away  the  colony 
[sic!]  of  Virginia.  ...  A  right  does  not  cease  to  be  a  right 
because  it  is  large."  A  motion  in  Congress  in  October,  1777, 
giving  that  body  the  right  to  fix  the  western  boundaries  of  the 
states  and  to  form  new  states  from  time  to  time  out  of  the  land 
beyond — an  act  important  as  the  first  suggestion  of  the  control 
of  Congress  over  the  territories — got  the  affirmative  vote  of 
Maryland  alone.  In  December,  1778,  the  Maryland  delegates 
in  Congress  were  instructed  not  to  ratify  the  Articles  of  Con- 
federation until  the  obnoxious  clause  in  Article  IX,  "No  state 
shall  be  deprived  of  territory  for  the  benefit  of  the  United 
States,"  should  be  repealed. 

There  was  but  one  way  to  break  the  deadlock  between  the 
landed  and  the  landless  states,  and  that  was  for  the  former  vol- 
untarily to  surrender  their  Western  claims.  New  York,  whose 
claims  were  based  not  on  charter  rights  but  on  numerous 
treaties  with  the  Iroquois  Indians  concluded  between  1684  and 
1752,  led  the  way  by  an  act  of  her  legislature  in  February, 
1780.  Within  the  next  decade  all  the  states  with  Western 
claims  had  followed  except  Georgia,  whose  final  action  was 
delayed  (on  account  of  Indian  dangers)  until  1802.  On  the 
day  of  the  execution  of  New  York's  deed  of  cession  in 
Congress  (March  i,  1781)  Maryland' signed  the  Articles  of 
Confederation. 


SURRENDER  OF 

WESTERN  CLAIMS 

BY  THE  STATES 

1780-1802 

SCALE  OF  MILES 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        115 

Though  Maryiaitfkdeserves  gratitude  for  insisting  on  this 
great  principle  of  equity  among  the  states,  the  chief  credit  for 
the  transaction  must  be  given  fro  Virginia  Her  claim  alone  was 
well  founded.  If  the  Stuart  charters  were  to  be  pleaded,  hers 
was  the  oldest,  and  in  its  form  of  1609  was  inclusive  of  the 
territory  claimed  by  all  the  states  north  of  her.  If  the  charters 
were  to  be  disregarded,  Virginia  could  point  to  her  splendid 
conquest  of  the  Northwest  during  the  Revolution.  Moreover, 
the  attitude  of  the  authorities  of  Virginia  was  reasonable  and 
conciliatory.  No  language  could  be  nobler  than  Jefferson's 'in 
his  proposal  to  the  convention  of  Pennsylvania  for  the  adjust- 
ment of  a  disputed  boundary  west  of  Fort  Pitt  (July,  1776) : 
"We  can  assure  you  that  the  colony  of  Virginia  does  not  enter- 
tain a  wish  that  one  inch  should  be  added  to  theirs  from  the 
territory  of  a  sister  colony,  and  we  have  perfect  confidence  that 
the  same  just  sentiment  prevails  in  your  House.  .  .  .  The 
decision,  whatever  it  be,  will  not  annihilate  the  lands.  They 
will  remain  to  be  occupied  by  Americans,  and  whether  these  be 
counted  in  the  number  of  this  or  that  of  the  United  States  will 
be  thought  a  matter  of  little  moment."  And  in  transmitting  to 
Congress  the  resolution  of  January  2,  1781,  by  which  Virginia 
agreed  to  cede  its  lands  in  the  Northwest  on  condition  that  all 
the  states  accept  the  Articles,  Jefferson,  then  governor  of  the 
state,  wrote,  "I  shall  be  rendered  very  happy  if  the  other  states 
of  the  Union,  equally  impressed  with  the  necessity  of  that  im- 
portant Convention  [the  Articles],  shall  be  willing  to  sacrifice 
equally  to  its  completion."  After  language  and  example  of  this 
sort  the  other  states  could  hardly  with  decency  refuse  to  sur- 
render their  shadowy  claims. 

March  i,  i  TSx^jeserves  to  rank  with  April  19,  1775,  July  4, 
1776,  and  April  30,  1789,  among  the  birtH3ays  of  the  American 
nation.  The  first  blow  struck  in  arms  for  liberty,  the  decla- 
ration of  our  independence,  the  inauguration  of  our  first  presi- 
dent, are  events  which  have  received  their  full  measure  of 
attention  from  historians.  But  none  of  these  events  was  fraught 
with  more  importance  than  the  signature  of  the  Maryland  dele- 
gates to  the  Articles  of  Confederation  and  the  acceptance  by 


Ii6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Congress  of  New  York's  cession  of  Western  land  claims.  By 
the  first  of  these  events  the  United  States  found  itself  for  the 
first  time  a  legally  constituted  government  with  its  powers  set 
down  in  black  on  white,  its  "perpetual  union  and  league  of 
friendship"  witnessed  by  the  hands  of  delegates  from  each  of 
the  thirteen  states.  By  the  second  the  United  States  was  in- 
vested with  the  beginnings  of  a  national  domain,  destined  to 
extend  to  the  Pacific,  whose  stewardship  was  to  prove  the 
greatest  source  of  our  national  wealth  and  whose  governance 
was  to  invite  the  chief  enlargement  of  our  federal  power. 

ANARCHY  IMMINENT 

In  the  same  year  that  the  Articles  of  Confederation  were 
adopted,  Josiah  Tucker,  Dean  of  Gloucester,  an  acrimonious  but 
observant  critic  of  American  affairs,  wrote  to  Louis  XVTs  fa- 
mous finance  minister  Necker  in  the  following  terms :  "As  to  the 
future  Grandeur  of  America  and  its  being  a  rising  Empire  under 
one  head,  whether  Republican  or  Monarchical,  it  is  one  of  the 
idlest  and  most  visionary  Notions  that  was  ever  conceived  by 
the  writers  of  Romance.  For  there  is  nothing  in  the  Genius  of 
the  People,  the  Situation  of  their  Country,  or  the  nature  of 
their  different  Climates  which  tends  to  countenance  such  a 
Supposition.  On  the  contrary,  every  Prognostic  that  can  be 
formed  from  a  Contemplation  of  their  mutual  Antipathies  and 
clashing  Interests,  their  Difference  of  Governments,  Habitudes, 
and  Manners,  plainly  indicates  that  the  Americans  will  have 
no  Center  of  Union  among  them,  and  no  common  Interest  to 
pursue,  when  the  Power  and  Government  of  England  are 
finally  removed." 

This  dismal  prophecy  came  dangerously  near  fulfillment  in 
the  six  or  seven  years  succeeding  the  surrender  at  Yorktown. 
Serious  financial,  economic,  and  diplomatic  problems,  some 
caused  by  the  war  and  some  by  the  cessation  of  the  war,  called 
for  a  firm  government  just  at  the  time  when  the  mutual  jeal- 
ousies and  tenacious  local  attachments  of  the  states  prevented 
them  from  entering  into  a  more  effective  union  than  that  of  the 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        117 

"Treaty  of  the  Confederation."  It  took  the  bitter  experience 
of  humiliation  abroad  and  anarchy  at  home,  of  poverty,  demor- 
alization, and  even  threatened  dissolution  of  the  Confederation, 
to  bring  the  states  to  a  reluctant  consent  to  the  establishment  of 
a  real  federal  government.  Some  of  the  leaders  were  despondent 
in  1786-1787.  John  Marshall  wrote,  "They  have  truth  on  their i 
side  who  say  that  mankind  is  incapable  of  governing  himself."l 
John  Jay  confided  to  Washington  that  he  was  more  fearful  of  the 
American  cause  than  at  any  time  during  the  war.  And  Washing- 
ton replied  to  Jay :  "Your  sentiment  that  our  affairs  are  drawing 
rapidly  to  a  crisis  accords  with  my  own.  What  the  event  will  be 
is  also  beyond  the  reach  of  my  foresight.  We  have  errors  to  cor- 
rect. We  have  probably  had  too  good  an  opinion  of  human 
nature  in  forming  our  confederation.  Experience  has  taught  us 
that  men  will  not  adopt  and  carry  into  execution  measures  best 
calculated  for  their  own  good,  without  the  intervention  of  a  coer- 
cive power.  I  do  not  conceive  that  we  can  exist  long  as  a  nation 
without  having  lodged  somewhere  a  power  which  will  pervade 
the  whole  Union  in  as  energetic  a  manner  as  the  authority  of 
the  state  governments  extends  over  the  several  states." 

So  long  as  the  war  lasted  the  inadequacy  of  the  loose  league 
of  the  states  was  not  wholly  apparent.  There  was  actually 
a  firmer  union  during  the  hostilities,  without  the  Articles,  than 
there  was  with  them  after  peace  came.  For  several  consider- 
ations urged  the  states  to  hold  together  and  show  some  respect 
for  their  central  steering  committee  of  Congress.  They  were 
waging  war  as  a  confederation  and  not  as  single  states;  they 
needed  to  present  a  united  front  against  Great  Britain;  they 
could  expect  aid  from  France  and  Holland  only  as  a  nation, 
and  only  as  a  nation  could  they  secure  the  recognition  of  their 
independence.  Moreover,  each  state,  under  the  apprehension 
of  invasion,  found  comfort  in  the  possibility  of  an  appeal  to 
the  continental  army  to  supplement  its  militia.  But  when  the 
war  was  over  and  independence  won,  it  seemed  to  many  that 
the  union  had  accomplished  its  purpose.  The  "general  govern- 
ment" might  remain,  to  be  sure,  to  carry  out  the  will  of  the 
states  in  those  matters  on  which  it  was  desirable  to  act  in 


n8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

unison, — foreign  war,  diplomacy,  interstate  controversies,  the 
disposition  of  national  territory,  and  the  like, — but  in  all  these 
things  it  should  still  be  the  servant  and  agent  of  the  states.  It 
could  not  levy  taxes  or  control  commerce  or  compel  a  state  to 
pay  its  quota  for  the  general  expenses,  for  it  had  no  executive 
or  judicial  organs  for  enforcing  its  laws.  It  was,  as  Gouver- 
neur  Morris  said,  "a  government  by  supplication."  Being  poor 
and  subservient  at  home,  it  naturallfy  could  not  speak  with 
authority  abroad.  When  Rhode  Island  defied  Congress,  Great 
Britain  could  hardly  be  expected  to  respect  that  body. 

Yet  it  would  be  hard  to  find  a  period  in  our  history  when  a 
strong,  efficient  government  was  more  needed  than  at  the  close 
of  the  Revolutionary  War.  Our  debt,  foreign  and  domestic, 
amounted  to  $43,000,000,  of  which  nearly  $8,000,000  had  been 
borrowed  in  Europe.1  The  interest  on  this  debt  could  be  paid 
only  by  a  vigorous  system  of  taxation.  The  people  of  the  United 
States  were,  as  Robert  Morris  wrote  to  Franklin,  "undoubtedly 
able  to  pay."  They  were  spending  freely  at  the  close  of  the  war. 
" Extravagant  luxury/'  " insatiable  thirst  for  riches,"  "specula- 
tion and  peculation,"  "an  alarming  spirit  of  venality,"  are  some 
of  the  phrases  which  sober  men  like  Washington,  Franklin,  and 
Adams  used  to  characterize  the  age.  Pelatiah  Webster,  a  dis- 
tinguished political  essayist  of  the  time,  wrote,  "Tho'  the  public 
treasury  was  so  distressed,  yet  the  states  were  really  overrun 
with  an  abundance  of  cash :  the  French  and  English  armies,  our 
foreign  loans,  Havannah  trade,  etc.  had  filled  the  country  with 
money."  The  control  of  this  money,  however,  the  states  deter- 
mined to  keep  in  their  own  hands.  By  a  false  and  foolish 
analogy  they  extended  their  hatred  of  general  taxation  to  their 
own  central  government,  declaring  against  the  "tyranny"  of 
"King  Congress"  as  fervently  as  they  had  against  that  of  King 
George.  They  had  fought  the  war  to  escape  taxation  by  any 
power  except  that  of  their  own  legislatures.  Let  Congress  "ask" 
for  the  money,  and  the  legislatures  would  grant  it. 

1  During  the  war  France  had  lent  us  $6,500,000;  Holland,  $1,300,000;  and 
Spain,  $200,000.  After  the  war  the  Dutch  lent  us  $2,000,000  more.  About  one  fifth 
of  what  we  borrowed  abroad  was  used  to  pay  the  interest  on  our  domestic  debt. 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        119 

The  way  in  which  the  states  honored  the  request  of  Congress 
for  money  must  have  made  persons  whose  memory  reached 
back  twenty  years  somewhat  lenient  in  their  judgment  of  Great 
Britain's  refusal  to  rely  on  requisitions  from  the  colonies  in- 
stead of  taxation.  During  the  entire  period  of  the  Confeder- 
ation, Congress  got  only  $6,000,000  of  the  $16,000,000  assessed 
on  the  states.  In  the  two  years  after  the  surrender  at  Yorktown, 
Congress  asked  for  $10,000,000.  By  June,  1784,  $1,486,511 
had  been  paid  in.  New  Hampshire  paid  $3000  of  her  quota  of 
$450,000;  Massachusetts,  $247,000  of  her  $1,600,000;  New 
York,  $39,000  of  her  $465,000;  Virginia,  $115,000  of  her 
$1,590,000 ;  and  so  on  down  the  line.  Delaware,  North  Carolina, 
and  Georgia  paid  absolutely  nothing.  No  state  except  South 
Carolina  paid  more  than  2  5  per  cent  of  its  assessment.  The  result 
was  more  borrowing  and  a  piling  up  of  the  interest  charges 
until  they  came  to  overbalance  the  total  receipts.  The  arrears 
of  interest  on  the  domestic  debt  grew  from  $3,000,000  to 
$11,000,000  in  the  five  years  preceding  Washington's  inaugu- 
ration. Robert  Morris,  the  superintendent  of  the  finances, 
resigned  because  it  did  not  consist  with  his  ideas  of  integrity 
"to  increase  our  debts  while  the  prospect  of  paying  them 
diminished." 

From  this  intolerable  situation  Congress  sought  relief  in  vain. 
In  February,  1781,  it  asked  for  the  power  to  levy  an  import 
duty  of  5  per  cent  solely  for  the  purpose  of  paying  the  interest 
and  principal  of  debts  contracted  on  the  faith  of  the  United 
States.  But  Rhode  Island  refused  her  consent,  and  Virginia, 
after  granting  it,  withdrew  it  on  the  ground  that  her  sover- 
eignty would  be  impaired  and  her  liberty  endangered.  Again, 
in  April,  1783,  Congress  asked  the  right  to  levy  a  small  import 
duty  for  a  period  of  twenty-five  years ;  but  after  a  delay  of 
three  years,  only  nine  states  had  been  persuaded  to  a  grudging 
consent.  Governor  Clinton  of  New  York,  when  finally  the 
consent  of  his  state  alone  was  needed  to  put  the  duty  into 
effect,  refused  to  call  the  legislature,  on  the  ground  that  he  had 
power  to  do  so  only  on  "  extraordinary  occasions."  Apparently 
the  impending  bankruptcy  of  the  United  States  was  not  an 


120  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

extraordinary  affair!  Robert  Morris  declared  that  exhorting 
the  states  to  tax  their  inhabitants  for  the  support  of  the  Union 
was  like  "preaching  to  the  dead." 

To  add  to  the  distress  of  the  Treasury,  there  was  dire  con- 
fusion in  the  currency.  When  the  war  broke  out,  Congress, 
having  no  money  and  no  source  of  income,  had  to  resort  to  bor- 
rowing. The  colonies,  being  largely  agricultural  communities, 
had  little  accumulated  capital  to  lend,  while  the  interruption  of 
our  commerce  with  the  British  ports  deprived  the  farmers  of 
the  currency  with  which  to  pay  their  taxes.  Foreign  loans  could 
be  expected  only  when  there  was  good  promise  of  the  success 
of  the  American  cause.  Congress,  therefore,  had  to  resort  to 
forced  loans  in  the  shape  of  issues  of  paper  money.  Unsecured 
paper  money  is  like  a  poison  in  the  currency  system  of  a  state. 
If  the  dose  is  small  and  the  financial  health  of  the  country  is 
vigorous,  the  harm  is  not  great — the  poison  is  absorbed.  But  as 
the  dose  becomes  larger  and  the  health  of  the  country  weaker, 
disastrous  results  follow.  The  value  of  the  paper  falls  with  a 
rapidity  proportional  to  the  waning  confidence  of  the  people 
in  the  ability  of  the  government  to  redeem  it  in  gold  and  silver. 
The  government  then  tries  to  recoup  its  loss  by  new  issues  of 
paper — or  to  cure  the  evil  by  increasing  it.  So,  beginning 
with  a  modest  issue  of  $2,000,000  in  1776,  Congress  had  multi- 
plied the  continental  paper  currency  a  hundredfold  by  the 
autumn  of  1 779.  Twenty  dollars  in  paper  were  required  to  pay 
for  merchandise  which  one  dollar  of  silver  would  buy.  A  hat 
cost  $40,  a  barrel  of  flour  Si  50.  A  year  later  the  paper  had  sunk 
to  one  fortieth  of  its  nominal  value  in  silver ;  and  still  another 
year  and  a  half  later,  shortly  after  the  adoption  of  the  Articles 
of  Confederation,  the  continental  paper  ceased  to  be  used  as 
currency,  but  was  bought  and  sold  by  speculators  at  prices 
ranging  all  the  way  from  a  mill  to  a  quarter  of  a  cent  on  a 
dollar  (May  30,  1781). 

While  the  Continental  Congress  was  learning  the  truth  of 
Thomas  Paine's  remark  that  "money  is  money  and  paper  is 
paper,  and  all  the  inventions  of  man  cannot  make  it  otherwise," 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        12 1 

while  it  saw  its  "fiat"  dollars  becoming  so  cheap  that  a  barber 
papered  his  shop  with  them  and  a  wag  feathered  his  tarred 
dog  with  them,  the  British  and  French  soldiers  and  the  new 
trade  with  the  French  and  Spanish  Indies  were  bringing  coin 
into  the  country  in  amounts  to  encourage  extravagance.  But 
when  the  war  was  over,  our  specie  began  to  be  drained  away 
with  startling  rapidity.  The  balance  of  trade  ran  strongly 
against  us.  For  the  year  1784  our  imports  from  Great  Britain 
amounted  to  $18,500,000,  a  figure  swollen  somewhat  by  Eng- 
land's determination  to  glut  the  American  market  and  destroy 
the  manufactures  which  had -been  begun  during  the  war.  Our 
exports  to  British  ports  in  the  same  year  were  only  $3,750,000. 
The  war  had  turned  us  from  colonies  of  Great  Britain  into  a 
foreign  nation,  and  therewith  the  Navigation  Acts  automat- 
ically excluded  us  from  a  trade  with  the  British  which,  though 
hampered  by  exasperating  regulations,  had  nevertheless  been 
highly  profitable  to  us  before  the  Revolution.  To  be  sure,  as  an 
independent  nation  we  were  now  free  to  make  such  commercial 
treaties  as  we  pleased  with  foreign  powers,  to  secure  our  share 
of  the  trade  of  the  world.  But  the  lack  of  authority  in  Con- 
gress to  regulate  our  commerce  by  uniform  restrictions  on  the 
states  stood  in  the  way  of  such  treaties.  As  for  getting  better 
terms  with  England,  we  were  in  the  position  of  suppliants  who 
had  but  yesterday  been  rebels.  John  Adams,  presented  as  our 
first  minister  at  the  court  of  St.  James,  in  May,  1785, endeavored 
in  several  interviews  with  Lord  Carmarthen  and  William  Pitt  to 
secure  some  privileges  for  American  trade  in  the  British  Empire. 
But  the  ministry  assumed  the  attitude  of  beati  possidentes. 
They  already  had  the  lion's  share  of  America's  patronage,  and 
saw  no  need  of  raising  up  a  rival  to  their  export  trade  across 
the  Atlantic  by  opening  the  West  Indian  ports  to  American 
vessels.  With  Congress  unable  to  force  the  states  to  adopt  a 
general  navigation  act,  Great  Britain  had  nothing  to  fear  in  the 
way  of  retaliation  or  reprisals  from  America.  Pitt  smiled 
urbanely  while  Adams  pleaded.  And  Adams,  consumed  with 
chagrin,  wrote  to  Jefferson  (who  was  having  his  own  difficulties 


122  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

in  Paris,  trying  to  get  our  wheat,  tobacco,  and  whale  oil  admit- 
ted to  the  French  ports),  "In  short,  sir,  I  am  likely  to  be  as 
insignificant  here  as  you  can  imagine." 

So  the  drain  of  specie  continued.  The  bark  Mary  Br dinar d, 
sailing  from  Boston  in  the  autumn  of  1786,  carried  back  to 
London  nearly  $50,000  in  Spanish,  French,  and  British  coins, 
while  the  farmers  in  the  western  counties  of  Massachusetts  were 
toiling  to  scrape  together  a  few  silver  pieces  to  pay  their  taxes 
and  to  still  the  demands  of  private  creditors  who  were  filling  the 
courts  with  suits  against  them.  The  precious  metals  were  going 
out  of  the  country  to  buy  luxuries  and  "  British  gewgaws." 
The  "embattled  farmers,"  who  had  left  their  plows  to  take  their 
rifles,  had  a  fine  reward  for  their  years  of  sacrifice :  suffering, 
hunger,  and  rags  in  the  service ;  a  discharge  without  a  farthing 
in  their  pockets;  a  return  to  acres  burdened  with  debt,  with 
eviction  or  imprisonment  threatening,  and  the  taxgatherer 
abroad  in  the  land.  The  usurer  reaped  his  accustomed  harvest 
of  plunder  from  the  poor.  When  the  farmer  received  conti- 
nental loan  certificates  for  his  services  in  war  or  his  produce  in 
peace,  he  was  obliged  to  part  with  them  at  a  discount  for 
ready  cash,  and  speculators  accumulated  for  trifling  sums  the 
paper  obligations  which  the  government  redeemed  a  few  years 
later  at  their  full  face  value. 

Everywhere,  naturally,  in  this  stress  of  poverty  the  debtor 
class  demanded  the  issue  of  paper  money  by  the  state  to  replace 
the  specie  which  was  being  drained  out  of  the  country.  In 
Rhode  Island  the  paper-money  men  got  control  of  the  legisla- 
ture and  paralyzed  business  by  forcing  the  creditor  to  accept  the 
depreciated  scrip  at  its  face  value.  In  Massachusetts,  where  the 
hard-money  men  kept  control  of  the  government,  the  debtors 
of  the  western  counties  rose  in  revolt  under  Captain  Daniel 
Shays,  forcibly  closed  the  courts  at  Concord  and  Worcester, 
attacked  the  arsenal  at  Springfield,  and  kept  the  state  in  terror 
for  five  months,  until  dispersed  by  the  militia  in  a  pitched  battle 
at  Petersham  (February,  1787).  Add  to  such  scenes  as  these 
the  vain  appeals  of  Congress  for  authority  to  raise  a  revenue 
by  import  duties  or  to  control  commerce  by  a  navigation  act, 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT       123 

the  selfish  disregard  of  each  state  for  the  economic  welfare  of 
its  neighbors,1  tariff  wars  and  boundary  disputes  between  the 
states,2  the  refusal  of  the  states  to  pay  their  assessed  quotas  for 
the  support  of  the  general  government,3  and  it  is  little  wonder 
that  the  United  States  under  the  Confederation,  without  an 
executive  department,  without  an  army  or  navy,  without  money, 
credit,  or  authority,  failed  to  win  the  respect  even  of  the  semi- 
barbarous  states  of  Morocco  and  Tripoli. 

Important  diplomatic  questions  were  pending  in  the  years 
immediately  following  the  war,  which  needed  the  backing  of  a 
strong  and  united  government.  We  did  not  yet  enjoy  that 
splendid  isolation  from  European  entanglements  which  Wash- 
ington counseled  in  his  " Farewell  Address"  of  1796,  and  which 
became  a  fact  at  the  close  of  our  second  war  with  England,  in 
1815.  Aside  from  our  money  obligations  to  France,  Holland, 
and  Spain,  we  were  involved  in  the  commercial  and  political 
rivalries  of  the  Old  World.  Our  entry  into  the  family  of  nations 
had  been  a  European  event.  The  Declaration  of  Independence 
was  an  apology  for  our  behavior,  submitted  to  a  "candid  world." 
One  of  the  earliest  committees  of  the  Continental  Congress  was 
appointed  for  the  purpose  of  seeking  European  alliances  and 
loans.  The  treaty  of  peace  of  1783  made  a  web  of  European 
complications  and  left  us  difficult  problems  to  settle,  especially 
with  Great  Britain  and  Spain,  our  vexatious  neighbors  on  the 
north,  west,  and  south. 

The  British  claimed  indemnification  for  the  Tories  whose 
property  had  been  confiscated,  and  full  payment  of  the  debts 

xln  a  debate  in  the  Virginia  assembly  in  1786,  on  the  proposition  to  give 
Congress  the  control  of  foreign  trade,  Charles  Thurston  said  that  it  was  "very 
doubtful  whether  it  would  not  be  better  to  encourage  the  British  rather  than 
the  eastern  (New  England,  New  York,  Philadelphia)  marine." 

2  New  York  taxed  firewood  from  Connecticut  and  farm  truck  from  New  Jersey 
landing  at  its  docks.   New  Jersey  replied  with  a  tax  on  a  lighthouse  which  New 
York  had  built  on  Jersey  soil  (Sandy  Hook) ,  and  the  Connecticut  farmers  formed 
a  nonexportation  association  to  starve  New  York  into  brotherly  conduct. 

3  In  February,  1786,  the  legislature  of  New  Jersey  complained  that  her  quota 
was  too  high  ($166,000)  and  refused  to  pay.   A  committee  of  Congress  visited 
Trenton  and  implored  the  state  not  to  fail  the  Union  in  so  critical  a  time.    The 
legislature  rescinded  the  vote,— but  waited  five  months  before  paying  the  money. 


124  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

due  to  British  merchants,  with  the  interest  accrued  during  the 
war.  For  security  they  held  on  to  several  rich  fur-trading  posts 
along  the  southern  shores  of  the  Great  Lakes  in  territory  ceded 
to  the  United  States  by  the  treaty  of  1783  (see  map,  p.  101). 
We  put  in  the  counterclaim  of  the  theft  of  negro  slaves  after  the 
war  and  the  seizure  by  British  cruisers  of  a  large  part  of  the  very 
merchandise  for  which  the  British  merchants  were  asking  pay- 
ment. We  demanded  the  evacuation  of  the  fur  posts.  The  letters 
of  all  our  public  men  who  dealt  with  the  British  government  in 
these  critical  years  are  filled  with  complaints  of  the  animosity  of 
the  ministry,  the  Parliament,  and  the  press  against  the  new  re- 
public. Benjamin  Franklin,  writing  from  Paris  to  the  president 
of  Congress  on  Christmas  Day,  1783,  says  of  the  British  court: 
"We  should,  I  think,  be  constantly  on  our  guard  and  impress 
strongly  on  our  minds  that,  though  it  has  made  peace  with  us, 
it  is  not  in  truth  reconciled  either  to  us  or  to  its  loss  of  us.  ... 
It  is  easy  to  see  by  the  general  tone  of  the  ministerial  news- 
papers and  by  the  malignant  improvement  their  ministers  make 
in  all  the  foreign  courts  of  every  little  accident  or  dissension 
among  us,  ...  all  which  are  exaggerated  to  represent  our 
governments  as  so  many  anarchies  of  which  the  people  them- 
selves are  weary,  .  .  .  that  they  bear  us  no  good  will,  and  that 
they  wish  the  reality  of  what  they  are  pleased  to  imagine."1 
For  eight  years  after  the  treaty  of  peace  the  British  govern- 
ment refused  to  send  a  minister  to  the  United  States,  Lord 
Carmarthen  hinting  to  Adams  with  malicious  sarcasm  that 
thirteen  ministers  would  be  necessary  for  diplomatic  business 
with  America. 

With  Spain  we  were  engaged  in  a  diplomatic  struggle  per- 
haps the  most  important  in  our  history,  for  it  brought  the  first 
test  of  the  fidelity  of  the  sections  of  our  country  to  the  Union 
and  put  in  jeopardy  the  allegiance  of  the  vast  region  between  the 
Alleghenies  and  the  Mississippi.  The  flag  of  Spain  has  now  dis- 
appeared from  both  the  continents  and  the  islands  of  the 
Western  world,  and  we  find  it  difficult  to  realize  how  vast  was 

1For  confirmation  of  this  feeling  see  Jefferson's  letter  from  Paris  to  John 
Page,  May  4,  1786  (P.  L.  Ford,  "  Writings  of  Thomas  Jefferson,"  Vol.  IV,  p.  214). 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        125 

her  colonial  empire  on  these  shores  at  the  close  of  the  American 
Revolution.  The  Gulf  of  Mexico  was  then  a  Spanish  lake: 
every  mile  of  its  shore  from  the  tip  of  Florida  to  the  tip  of 
Yucatan  was  under  Spain's  flag.  Holding  the  mouth  of  the 
Mississippi,  she  controlled  the  commerce  of  the  great  river 
basin.  All  the  country  west  of  the  Mississippi  to  the  Pacific 
coast  was  acknowledged  Spanish  domain  by  the  treaty  of  1763. 
Spain  had  hesitatingly  joined  France  in  the  war  against  Eng- 
land in  1779  solely  for  the  purpose  of  recovering  Gibraltar, 
Minorca,  and  Florida,  which  she  had  been  forced  to  give  to 
England  in  the  Treaties  of  Utrecht  (1713)  and  Paris  (1763). 
Spain  did  not,  like  France,  become  an  ally  of  the  United  States. 
She  had  no  sympathy  with  revolting  colonies  in  America,  and 
she  did  not  acknowledge  our  independence  until  England 
had  conceded  it.  She  opposed  our  negotiations  for  peace  in 
1782,  because  she  had  not  yet  got  her  coveted  spoils  of  war. 
When  the  peace  was  concluded  she  refused  to  agree  to  the 
eighth  article,  which  declared  that  the  navigation  of  the  Missis- 
sippi should  be  free  to  both  nations.  She  was  determined  to 
keep  the  new  United  States  from  becoming  a  strong  rival  power 
in  America.  It  was  her  ambassador  in  Paris,  Count  Aranda,  who 
proposed  to  Vergennes  the  plan  of  hemming  in  the  new  nation 
between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  sea,  leaving  the  back  country 
as  Indian  territory.  When  that  plan  failed  and  the  American 
pioneers  swarmed  across  the  mountains  to  the  fertile  valleys 
of  the  Ohio,  the  Cumberland,  and  the  Tennessee,  Spain  sealed 
up  the  mouth  of  the  great  trunk  river  to  their  commerce.1 

These  pioneers  were  a  hardy  race  of  men,  who,  in  their  own 
language  in  a  memorial  to  Congress,  had  "  inherited  the  highest 
and  most  extensive  ideas  of  liberty."  The  lure  of  adventure, 
the  appeal  of  the  virgin  soil,  the  chance  of  escape  from  the 
taxgatherer  and  the  inquisitive  lawyer,  were  potent  motives  for 

1  Spain's  resentment  against  the  United  States  was  heightened,  but  the  situa- 
tion was  not  materially  changed,  by  the  discovery  in  1784  of  a  secret  clause  in 
the  treaty  between  England  and  the  United  States,  according  to  which  we  were 
to  accept  the  parallel  of  32°  30'  as  our  southern  boundary  from  the  Mississippi  to 
the  Chattahoochee  in  case  England  retained  Florida,  but  should  come  down  to 
31°  if  Florida  should  be  restored  to  Spain— as  it  was  in  fact  (see  map,  p.  101). 


126  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

migration.  The  pioneers,  like  the  early  settlers  of  Plymouth 
and  the  Connecticut  valley,  carried  with  them  a  simple  political 
philosophy.  The  land  was  God's  earth,  and  whoever  wished 
might  settle  where  he  would.  There  were  no  distinctions  of 
birth  or  wealth  in  the  little  clearing  "  edged  by  the  primeval 
forest.'7  The  men  formed  associations  to  punish  thieving,  re- 
strain lawlessness,  and  guard  their  settlements  from  becoming 
"asylums  for  fugitives  from  justice  and  their  just  debts."  They 
organized  themselves  into  military  companies,  the  Kentuckians 
offering  "a  respectable  body  of  prime  riflemen"  to  aid  George 
Rogers  Clark  in  his  campaign  of  1778.  The  existence  of  these 
pioneer  settlements  was  one  of  the  chief  factors  in  the  surrender 
to  Congress  of  the  Western  land  claims  of  the  states  and  the 
Jcreation  of  that  national  domain  which,  as  we  have  seen,  was 
(one  of  the  greatest  sources  of  strength  and  authority  to  the 
Xlnion. 

The  Western  settlers  naturally  wanted  the  free  use  of  the 
Mississippi.  As  early  as  1780  they  prayed  Congress  that  "the 
trade  on  the  western  waters"  might  be  opened  for  their  relief; 
and  John  Jay,  the  Secretary  of  Congress,  was  soon  afterward 
laboring  in  Madrid  to  secure  this  boon.  But  the  Spanish 
minister  Florida-Blanca  told  Jay  that  his  master  the  king  re- 
garded the  exclusion  of  all  foreigners  from  the  Mississippi  as 
far  more  important  even  than  the  recovery  of  Gibraltar.  Jay 
left  Madrid  in  1782  to  take  part  in  the  peace  negotiations  at 
Paris,  but  on  the  arrival  at  Philadelphia  of  Gardoqui,  the  first 
Spanish  minister  to  the  United  States,  Jay,  then  Secretary  for 
Foreign  Affairs,  resumed  the  diplomatic  negotiations.  The 
Eastern  states  wanted  a  commercial  treaty  with  Spain  which 
should  admit  their  lumber,  wheat,  whale  oil,  fish,  indigo,  and 
naval  stores  into  the  Spanish  ports,  bringing  in  return  much 
needed  specie  into  the  United  States.  Such  a  treaty  would  also 
influence  France,  Portugal,  and  the  Mediterranean  powers  to 
make  favorable  terms  for  our  shipping.  As  an  offset  to  these 
advantages  the  right  of  a  few  thousand  back  countrymen  to 
carry  their  hogs  and  tobacco  to  the  Spanish  ports  on  the  lower 
Mississippi  and  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  seemed  trifling.  Why 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        127 

should  the  settlement  of  the  West  be  encouraged  anyway?  It 
only  drained  off  men  needed  for  the  industries  at  home  and 
brought  the  new  clearings  into  competition  with  the  unoccupied 
areas  in  the  old  states,  making  labor  dearer  and  land  cheaper. 
The  Southern  states,  with  larger  patriotic  vision,  supported 
the  claims  of  the  Western  settlers  and  warned  Congress  that 
if  it  abandoned  them  to  the  pitiless  Spanish  policy  of  exclusion 
they  might  throw  off  their  allegiance.  Spanish  agents  were 
already  busy  sowing  gold  and  discontent  among  the  settlers — 
and  gold  looked  attractive  to  men  who  were  reduced  to  paying 
their  taxes  in  grain,  skins,  and  whisky. 

Jay,  after  endless  haggling  with  Gardoqui,  negotiated  a  com- 
promise treaty  in  17,85,  by  which  Spain  was  to  make  certain 
concessions  to  our  Atlantic  trade,  but  to  keep  the  Mississippi 
closed  to  American  boats  for  twenty-five  years.  The  new  West 
was  in  an  uproar.  An  American  trader's  goods  were  confiscated 
at  Natchez,  and  in  return  the  Spanish  stores  at  Vincennes  were 
plundered.  The  new  state  of  Franklin  offered  to  raise  1500 
men  "to  thrust  the  perfidious  Castilian  into  a  better  conduct 
towards  the  people  of  the  United  States."  A  letter  to  Jay,  pur- 
porting to  come  from  a  gentleman  at  the  falls  of  the  Ohio, 
declared  that  "to  make  us  vassals  to  the  Spaniards  is  a  griev- 
ance not  to  be  borne."  "Twenty  thousand  troops,"  he  contin- 
ued, "can  easily  be  raised  west  of  the  Alleghanies  to  drive  the 
Spaniards  from  their  settlements  at  the  mouth  of  the  river.  If 
this  is  not  countenanced  in  the  east,  we  will  throw  off  our 
allegiance  and  look  elsewhere  for  help.  Nor  will  we  seek  in 
vain,  for  even  now  Great  Britain  stands  with  open  arms  to 
receive  us."  Washington  declared  that  the  West  stood  upon 
a  pivot — "the  touch  of  a  feather  will  turn  them  any  way." 
Loyal  as  the  men  of  the  West  were  to  the  Union,  the  prospect 
of  being  condemned  to  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  economic 
stagnation  for  the  benefit  of  the  merchant  princes  of  Boston 
and  New  York  was  enough  to  shake  their  allegiance ;  and  the 
brutally  frank  assertion  of  Gorham  of  Massachusetts  that  it 
would  be  a  good  thing  for  the  Atlantic  states  to  have  the  Mis- 
sissippi closed  for  twenty-five  years  drew  from  Madison  a 


128  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

stinging  rebuke  for  selfish  sectional  feeling.  The  Jay-Gardoqui 
treaty  failed  to  be  ratified  by  the  requisite  number  of  states 
(nine),  but  the  lesson  of  it  was  plain.  Jefferson  wrote  from 
Paris  in  December,  1786,  that  the  disposition  to  shut  up  the 
Mississippi  gave  him  "serious  apprehensions  of  the  severance 
of  the  Eastern  and  Western  parts  of  our  Confederacy." 

Although  the  important  diplomatic  controversies  were  with 
England  and  Spain,  our  foreign  ministers  everywhere  felt  their 
insignificance  under  the  weak  government  of  the  Confederation. 
"We  are  the  lowest  and  most  obscure  of  the  whole  diplomatic 
tribe,"  wrote  Jefferson  in  bitterness  from  Paris.  France  was 
our  ally,  but  she  opened  only  four  of  her  home  ports  to  our 
ships  and  revoked  the  complete  freedom  of  trade  which  she 
had  given  us  in  the  Indies  during  the  war  with  England.  Jef- 
ferson could  make  no  head  against  the  corrupt  ring  of  tax- 
farmers  who  controlled  the  tobacco  trade  in  France.  The 
ministers  of  Louis  XVI  told  him  plainly  that  they  could  not 
recognize  the  American  Congress  as  a  "government."  The 
Dutch  bankers  were  anxious  about  their  loans  to  the  new 
republic  and  kept  writing  to  Paris  to  be  assured  that  repudia- 
tion and  bankruptcy  were  not  imminent.  The  pirates  of  the 
Barbary  States  seized  our  vessels  in  the  Mediterranean,  holding 
American  seamen  for  ransom.  An  "ambassador"  from  Tripoli 
visited  John  Adams  in  London  and  demanded  30,000  guineas 
for  each  of  the  four  Barbary  powers  (Morocco,  Algiers,  Tunis, 
and  Tripoli)  as  the  price  of  a  commercial  treaty.  As  120,000 
guineas  was  half  again  as  much  as  the  total  receipts  of  Congress, 
there  was  little  temptation  to  yield  to  this  blackmailing  invi- 
tation. Jefferson  wrote  home  urging  that  the  United  States 
"begin  a  navy  and  decide  on  a  war  with  these  pyrates,"  adding 
that  Paul  Jones  with  half  a  dozen  frigates  would  totally  destroy 
their  commerce.  "Be  assured,"  he  says,  "that  the  present  dis- 
respect of  the  nations  of  Europe  for  us  will  inevitably  bring  us 
insults  which  must  involve  us  in  war :  a  coward  is  much  more 
exposed  to  quarrels  than  a  man  of  spirit." 

Some  influential  men  even  despaired  of  republican  govern- 
ment at  all.  "The  late  turbulent  scenes  in  Massachusetts 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        129 

[Shays's  Rebellion]  and  infamous  ones  in  Rhode  Island,"  wrote 
Madison  early  in  1787,  "have  done  inexpressible  injury  to  the 
republican  character  in  that  part  of  the  United  States ;  and  a 
propensity  towards  monarchy  is  said  to  have  been  produced  by 
it  in  some  leading  minds."  Jay  also,  in  a  letter  to  Washington, 
expressed  the  fear  that  "if  faction  should  long  bear  down  law 
and  government  .  .  .  the  more  sober  part  of  the  people  may 
even  think  of  a  king."  That  some  not  only  thought  of  a  king 
but  even  made  serious  advances  in  seeking  a  candidate  for  the 
American  throne  is  proved  beyond  a  doubt  by  a  letter  dis- 
covered in  the  Prussian  Hausarchiv  at  Charlottenburg  (Berlin) 
and  published  in  the  American  Historical  Review  for  October, 
1911.  The  letter  was  written  by  Prince  Henry  of  Prussia, 
brother-in-law  of  Frederick  the  Great,  to  Baron  Steuben,  who 
made  his  home  in  New  York  after  the  American  Revolution. 
It  contains  a  respectful  but  firm  declination  to  attempt  to  make 
good  in  the  office  in  which  George  III  had  so  recently  failed.1 

Of  course,  these  evils,  foreign  and  domestic,  were  not  the 
fault  of  the  Articles  of  Confederation.  They  were  in  part  the 
heritage  of  the  war  and  in  part  due  to  social  and  political 
causes  reaching  far  back  into  the  colonial  period.  The  rivalry 
between  the  debtor  communities  on  the  inland  farms  and  the 
wealthy  merchants  and  bankers  of  the  coast  regions,  who  lent 
them  money  at  high  rates  of  interest  and  bought  up  the  best 
lands  of  the  West  at  a  few  cents  an  acre ; 2  the  reluctance  in  a 

1Many  years  later  (December,  1816)  James  Monroe,  then  president-elect,  in 
a  letter  to  Andrew  Jackson,  declared  that  some  of  the  leaders  in  1786-1787  "en- 
tertained principles  unfriendly  to  our  system  of  government"  and  meant  to  make 
a  change  in  it ;  and  that  they  were  disappointed  in  not  getting  the  assent  of 
George  Washington  (see  Monroe,  "Works,"  ed.  Hamilton,  Vol.  V,  p.  343). 

2"In  1784  Washington  traveled  through  the  mountains  to  the  Kanawha,  and 
returning  wrote  several  interesting  and  important  letters  on  the  subject  of  the 
Western  lands.  He  declared  that  such  was  the  rage  for  speculating  in  and 
forestalling  lands  that  scarce  a  valuable  spot  within  easy  reach  of  the  Ohio 
was  left  without  a  claimant.  Men  talked  of  50,000  acres  or  even  500,000  with 
as  much  facility  as  a  gentleman  formerly  did  of  1000"  (Edward  Channing, 
"History  of  the  United  States,"  Vol.  Ill,  p.  530).  Washington's  own  holdings 
of  Western  land,  according  to  his  will,  were  41,136  acres,  exclusive  of  his  lands 
in  the  settled  parts  of  Virginia. 


130  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

time  of  economic  depression  to  pay  taxes  to  be  sent  to  a  remote 
treasury  and  spent  for  objects  of  dubious  benefit;  the  harsh 
effects  of  the  British  Navigation  Acts  and  the  jealous  Spanish 
policy  of  closing  the  Mississippi, — all  would  have  existed  even 
if  the  strongest  kind  of  federal  government  had  been  devised 
in  1780.  Proof  of  this  is  the  fact  that  these  evils  did  not  dis- 
appear until  long  after  the  Constitution  was  adopted.  But 
these  problems  revealed  more  clearly  every  year  the  inadequacy 
of  the  Articles  to  keep  the  Union  together.  By  1786  the  great 
majority  of  influential  men  had  been  converted  to  the  position 
which  a  few  like  Hamilton,  Washington,  and  Madison  had 
reached  before  the  treaty  of  peace  was  signed;  namely,  that 
more  power  must  be  lodged  with  Congress  if  we  were  to  vindi- 
cate our  independence  before  the  nations  of  the  world.  "To 
be  more  exposed  in  the  eyes  of  the  world  and  more  contemptible 
than  we  are  already,"  wrote  Washington,  "is  hardly  possible. 
.  .  .  The  Confederation  appears  to  me  to  be  little  more  than 
a  shadow  without  a  substance.  .  .  .  We  are  fast  verging  to 
anarchy  and  confusion." 

The  tendency  of  our  historical  writing  has  been  to  do  full 
justice  to  the  "anarchy  and  confusion"  under  the  Articles,  in 
order  that  they  may  serve  as  a  foil  against  which  the  almost 
supernatural  virtues  of  the  Constitution  shall  shine  with  an 
added  brilliancy.  But  in  spite  of  the  deserved  disparagement 
of  the  Articles,  several  important  positive  contributions  to 
nationalism  were  made  under  them  and  by  them  in  the  trying 
years  of  our  critical  period.  The  Union  was  actually  held 
together  and  Union  sentiment  was  undoubtedly  stronger  in 
1787  than  at  the  close  of  the  war.  Sectionalism  was  rebuked 
and  even  hissed  on  the  floor  of  Congress.  The  great  back  coun- 
try was  rapidly  settled  by  men  who  looked  to  the  national 
government  for  protection  and  petitioned  Congress  for  state- 
hood. Through  the  voluntary  surrender  of  their  Western  claims 
by  several  of  the  states  an  immense  national  domain  was  ac- 
quired, whose  sale  held  the  promise  (when  the  Indians  should 
be  subjugated  and  the  quarrel  with  Spain  settled)  of  extinguish- 
ing the  whole  domestic  debt.  Our  diplomacy,  if  not  successful, 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        131 

was  able  and  dignified  in  the  hands  of  Adams,  Jay,  and  Jeffer- 
son. Treaties  of  commerce  were  concluded  with  Prussia  and 
some  of  the  minor  states  of  Europe,  and  by  1789  such  a  mitiga- 
tion of  the  commercial  policy  of  England,  France,  and  Spain 
had  been  secured  that  our  trade  with  the  West  Indies  was  con- 
siderably improved.1  In  addition,  we  had  opened  new  routes 
of  trade  to  China  and  the  East  Indies.  The  Empress,  sailing 
from  New  York  on  Washington's  birthday,  1784,  returned  from 
the  Orient  in  May,  1785,  loaded  with  silks,  tea,  ivory,  and 
spices — the  first  American  vessel  to  visit  the  Celestial  Empire. 
Four  years  later  eighteen  American  ships  were  reported  in  the 
harbor  of  Canton.  These  were  no  mean  accomplishments  in 
the  midst  of  the  financial  distress  and  political  impotence  under 
which  our  government  was  laboring. 

Finally,  Congress  in  its  last  will  and  testament  under  the 
Articles  of  Confederation  accomplished  a  work  of  great  national 
importance  in  the  organization  of  the  territory  north  of  the 
Ohio  River.  The  influence  of  the  frontier  on  the  development 
of  American  nationality  has  been  so  constant  and  so  potent,  its 
contribution  to  the  American  ideals  of  liberty,  democracy,  and 
union  so  incalculable,  that  the  first  effective  plan  for  the 
organization  of  the  Western  territory,  the  Northwest  Ordinance, 
deserves  special  emphasis.  It  laid  the  foundation  of  our  colo- 
nial policy — that  process  by  which  we  pushed  our  settlements 
westward,  subduing  the  Indian  wilderness  to  civilized  life,  until 
our  frontier  vanished  beyond  the  sunsets  of  the  Golden  Gate, 
and  an  unbroken  band  of  states  reached  from  ocean  to  ocean. 
The  Ordinaa££~Q|jL787  provided  for  territorial  gnvprnments  in 
the  Northwest  with  "admission  to  a  share  in  federal  councils 
on  an  equal  footing  with  the  original  thirteen  states  at  as  early 

1  British  exports  to  the  United  States  in  1789  and  1790  were  £2,525,298 
and  £3,431,775  respectively,  as  against  £1,603,465  in  1786.  "It  is  safe  to  say," 
writes  Professor  Channing,  "that  in  the  year  of  the  ratification  of  the  Con- 
stitution of  the  United  States  [1788]  the  foreign  commerce  [interrupted  by  the 
war]  had  been  reestablished."  So  Professor  Callender:  "Economic  conditions 
changed  from  extreme  depression  to  almost  normal  prosperity  before  the  new 
government  came  into  existence  in  the  spring  of  1789  and  before  any  of  its 
measures  had  time  to  produce  an  effect." 


132  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

periods  as  may  be  consistent  with  the  general  interests."  It 
pledged  the  states  made  from  this  territory  to  perpetual  ad- 
herence to  the  Union.  It  guaranteed  a  political  and  social 
democracy  by  prohibiting  the  entail  of  property  and  the  intro- 
duction of  slavery.  It  secured  full  liberty  of  conscience  and 
worship.  It  made  provision  for  public  education  and  extended 
the  privilege  of  Habeas  Corpus,  trial  by  jury,  due  process  of 
law,  and  the  sanctity  of  contracts  to  the  new  region.  In  a  word. 
it  made  the  territories  of  the  United  States  not  subject  lands  but 
sistej*Jajicls,  educated  from  their  first  settlement  to  take  their 
place  eventually  as  full  members  in  the  family  of  states.  Daniel 
Webster  said  in  the  United  States  Senate  forty  years  after  the 
passage  of  the  Ordinance,  "I  doubt  whether  any  single  law  of 
any  lawgiver  ancient  or  modern  has  produced  effects  of  more 
distinct  and  lasting  character."  And  Senator  George  F.  Hoar, 
in  his  address  on  the  centennial  anniversary  of  the  first  settle- 
ment made  in  this  territory  (at  Marietta,  1788),  declared  that 
the  Ordinance  of  1787  "belongs  with  the  Declaration  of  Inde- 
pendence and  the  Constitution  as  one  of  the  three  title  deeds 
of  American  constitutional  liberty." 

The  economist  Tench  Coxe  read  a  paper  on  the  reform  of 
our  commercial  system  before  a  group  of  publicists  and  scholars 
gathered  at  Benjamin  Franklin's  house  in  Philadelphia  just  a 
fortnight  before  the  delegates  from  a  quorum  of  the  states 
arrived  in  that  city  for  the  opening  of  the  Constitutional 
Convention.  "The  foundations  of  national  wealth  and  con- 
sequence," he  said,  "are  so  firmly  laid  in  the  United  States, 
that  no  foreign  power  can  undermine  or  destroy  them.  But 
the  enjoyment  of  these  substantial  blessings  is  rendered  pre- 
carious by  domestic  circumstances.  Scarcely  held  together  by 
a  weak  and  half-formed  federal  constitution,  the  powers  of  our 
national  government  are  unequal  to  the  complete  execution 
of  any  salutary  purpose,  foreign  or  domestic.  .  .  .  We  must 
immediately  remedy  this  defect  or  suffer  exceedingly.  ...  If 
we  are  to  continue  one  people,  a  system  which  will  promote  the 
general  interests  with  the  smallest  injury  to  the  particular  ones 
has  become  indispensably  necessary."  The  day  of  remedy  was 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT       133 

at  hand.  Even  as  Coxe  was  speaking  the  members  were  gather- 
ing for  that  immortal  summer's  work,  from  May  to  September, 
1787,  which  produced  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States. 

THE  CONSTITUTION 

Five  generations  of  Americans  have  lived  under  the  Consti- 
tution of  the  United  States.  They  have  seen  the  area  of  our 
country  more  than  trebled,  with  distant  tropical  islands  added 
as  colonies.  They  have  seen  our  population  increase  twenty- 
fivefold  and  our  wealth  over  sixtyfold.  They  have  seen 
millions  of  the  poor  and  oppressed,  swept  from  the  dusty 
corners  of  Europe,  seeking  on  these  shores  the  freedom  and 
opportunity  denied  to  them  at  home.  Orators,  statesmen,  and 
historians  have  celebrated  the  Constitution  as  the  source  of 
these  political  blessings,  in  terms  so  extravagant  that  some- 
thing like  a  cult  arose  to  put  the  document  "  among  those  things 
which  a  nation  with  loving  reverence  has  determined  to  place 
beyond  all  question."  Gladstone  spoke  of  it  as  a  kind  of  sudden 
inspiration  or  revelation — "the  most  wonderful  work  ever 
struck  off  at  a  given  time  by  the  brain  and  purpose  of  man." 
John  Marshall,  for  thirty  years  chief  justice  of  the  Supreme 
Court,  spoke  of  the  Constitution  as  "an  expression  of  the  clear 
and  deliberate  will  of  the  whole  people." 

It  is  no  disparagement  to  the  Constitution  that  a  newer  school 
of  political  writers,  intent  on  studying  the  wonderful  document 
in  its  social  and  economic  origins,  have  shown  such  statements 
as  Gladstone's  and  Marshall's  to  be  quite  far  from  the  truth. 
The  Constitution  was  not  a  sudden  inspiration  but  a  most 
laborious  achievement.  Every  clause  of  it  grew  out  of  the  pro- 
blems with  which  the  Confederation  was  confronted.  So  far 
from  being  the  expression  of  "the  clear  and  deliberate  will  of 
the  whole  people,"  it  was  the  work  of  a  very  small  and  select 
class.1  It  was  formulated  by  a  convention  of  fifty-five  men 

*In  the  sixth  volume  of  his  "History  of  the  United  States"  (p.  450), 
George  Bancroft  says,  "The  people  of  the  States  demanded  a  federal  convention 
to  form  the  Constitution,  .  .  the  Federal  Congress  offered  that  Constitution 


134  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

chosen  by  the  state  legislatures,  which  were  all  restricted  to  the 
representatives  of  property  interests.  It  was  debated  in  secret 
sessions,  with  sentinels  posted  at  the  door  of  the  hall.  It  was 
accepted  by  great  states  like  Pennsylvania,  Massachusetts,  and 
Virginia  only  after  bitter  conflicts  in  the  ratifying  conventions. 
New  York  adopted  it  by  a  margin  of  only  three  votes.  It  was 
"extorted,"  as  John  Adams  said,  "from  a  reluctant  people  by 
grinding  necessity."  It  was  bitterly  fought  over,  clause  by 
clause,  by  the  representatives  of  the  opposing  interests  of  the 
large  and  the  small  states,  the  Eastern  merchants  and  the  South- 
ern planters,  until  it  seemed  likely  to  the  sanest  mind  in  the 
Convention  that  the  members  would  disperse  without  reaching 
any  agreement.1 

In  our  study  of  the  rise  and  development  of  the  American 
nation  the  formation  of  the  Constitution  is  a  topic  of  the  first 
importance.  The  Declaration  of  Independence  announced,  and 
the  treaty  of  1783  confirmed,  the  existence  nf  the  new  Cation. 
But  as  yet  we  were  a  nation  without  a  state,  like  the  Saxon 
tribes  in  England  before  Alfred  the  Great,  or  the  principalities 
of  Germany  and  Italy  before  the  work  of  Bismarck  and  Ca- 
vour.  A  nation  without  a  state  is  like  a  spirit  without  a  body, 
an  idea  without  form.  The  Constitution  furnished  that  body 
and  form.  It  provided  an  effective  government  to  hold  freedom 
in  the  check  of  law,  and  it  has  proved,  on  the  whole,  the  most 
successful  attempt  ever  made  in  the  world's  history  to  reconcile 
the  conflicting  forces  of  liberty  and  authority.  With  very  few 
amendments  it  has  been  adapted  to  the  needs  of  a  country 
whose  rapid  growth  has  been  one  of  the  marvels  of  modern 
history,  and  it  is  today  the  oldest  written  constitution  in  force 
among  the  nations  of  Christendom. 

severally  to  the  people  of  each  State,  and  by  their  united  voice  ...  it  was 
made  the  binding  form,  of  government."  Every  clause  of  this  passage  is  erroneous. 
1  Washington  wrote  to  Hamilton,  July  10,  1787,  in  the  midst  of  the  deliber- 
ations of  the  Convention :  "  I  almost  despair  of  seeing  a  favorable  issue,  and  do 
therefore  repent  having  had  any  agency  in  the  business.  The  men  who  oppose  a 
strong  and  energetic  government  are,  in  my  opinion,  narrow-minded  politicians 
or  else  under  the  influence  of  local  views.  .  .  .  The  crisis  is  equally  important 
and  alarming." 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        135 

In  September,  1780,  six  months  before  the  Articles  of  Con- 
federation went  into  effect,  the  prescient  genius  of  Alexander 
Hamilton  detected  the  causes  of  the  weakness  of  Congress,  and 
in  a  letter  to  Madison  he  suggested  the  immediate  summons  of  a 
convention  of  all  the  states  "with  full  authority  to  conclude 
finally  on  a  form  of  general  Confederation  ...  to  give  Con- 
gress complete  sovereignty  in  all  that  relates  to  war,  peace, 
trade,  finance,  and  management  of  foreign  affairs,"  and  "to  pro- 
vide certain  perpetual  revenues  .  .  .  which  together  with  the 
duties  on  trade  and  the  unlocated  [unsurveyed]  lands,  would 
give  Congress  a  substantial  existence  and  a  stable  foundation." 
Every  year  that  passed  revealed  more  clearly  the  wisdom  of 
Hamilton's  recommendations  and  increased  the  number  of  dis- 
tinguished voices  demanding  an  adequate  government.  Pages 
could  be  filled  with  quotations  from  Washington's  letters  from 
1781  on,  urging  reform.  In  1783  he  addressed  a  circular  letter 
to  all  the  governors  of  the  states  from  his  headquarters  at  New- 
burgh,  where  he  had  just  stifled  an  incipient  mutiny:  "There  is 
an  option  still  left  to  the  United  States.  This  is  the  moment  to 
establish  or  ruiri  their  national  character  forever.  ...  It  is  yet 
to  be  decided  whether  the  Revolution  must  be  considered  a  bless- 
ing or  a  curse."  And  three  years  later,  when  the  evils  of  the 
Confederation  had  reduced  us  to  "scarce  the  appearance  of  a 
government,"  he  wrote,  "I  do  not  conceive  that  we  can  exist  long 
as  a  nation  without  having  lodged  somewhere  a  power  which  will 
pervade  the  whole  Union  in  as  energetic  a  manner  as  the 
authority  of  the  State  governments  extends  over  the  several 
States." 

Thomas  Jefferson  is  generally  cited  as  the  advocate  of  large 
local  powers  against  a  central  federal  authority.  Yet  he  wrote 
from  Paris  to  Madison  in  1786,  "The  policies  of  Europe  render 
it  indispensibly  necessary  that  with  respect  to  everything  exter- 
nal we  be  one  nation  only,  firmly  hooped  together" ;  and  to 
Monroe  a  few  months  later,  "There  will  be  no  money  in  the 
treasury  until  the  Confederacy  shows  its  teeth ;  the  states  must 
see  the  rod,  and  perhaps  it  must  be  felt  by  some  of  them." 
With  respect  to  things  internal  too  this  same  disastrous  year 


136  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  1786  was  revealing  the  need  of  a  nation  "firmly  hooped 
together."  The  East  and  the  South  were  nearly  ready  to  part 
company  on  the  Mississippi  question.  War  was  imminent 
between  several  states  over  disputed  boundaries  and  land 
claims.  Civil  war  was  actually  ablaze  in  Massachusetts  in 
Shays's  Rebellion.  A  group  of  "Hartford  wits,"  in  verse  lugu- 
brious enough  to  match  the  situation,  celebrated  the  reign  of 
anarchy  in  the  mock  epic  "The  Anarchiad": 

Thy  Constitution,  Chaos,  is  restored. 

Law  sinks  before  thy  uncreating  Word. 

Thy  hand  unbars  th'  unfathomed  gulf  of  fate, 

And  in  deep  darkness  'whelms  the  new-born  state. 

To  the  Virginia  legislature,  and  especially  to  James  Madison, 
is  due  the  credit  for  starting  the  negotiations  which  led  directly 
to  the  new  Constitution.  Maryland  and^Virprinia  had  a  long- 
standing dispute  over  the  navigation  of  the  Potomac  and  the 
waters  of  Chesapeake  Bay"  On  the  last  day  of  the  session  of 
1784  Madison  got  the  Virginia  legislature  to  appoint  a  com- 
mittee to  treat  with  Maryland,  and  the  latter  state,  well  dis- 
posed to  her  powerful  neighbor  on  account  of  Virginia's  recent 
cession  of  her  lands  in  the  West,  responded  heartily.  The 
committees  met  at  Alexandria,  March  28,  1785,  and  soon  ad- 
journed, by  Washington's  invitation,  to  Mount  Vernon,  where 
the  conference  widened  into  a  general  discussion  of  commerce 
among  the  Middle  States.  It  was  felt  that  Delaware  and 
Pennsylvania  should  participate,  and  Maryland  then  made  the 
suggestion  that  delegates  from  all  the  states  meet  to  confer  on 
commerce  and  navigation.  In  January,  1786,  the  Virginia 
legislatm^Jssu£d__a-call  for  such  a  meeting  to  be  held  at 
Annapolis,  Maryland,  "to  take  into  consideration  th£_Jrad&. 
of  the  UnitedJStates  .  .  .  and  to  consider  how  far  a  uniform 
system  in  their  commercial  regulations  may  be  necessary  to 
their  common  interests  and  their  permanent  harmony."  Only 
five  states  were  represented  at  Annapolis  in  September,  1786, 
though  four  more  had  appointed  delegates.  They  were  too  few 
to  attempt  any  alterations  in  the  form  of  government,  but  they 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        137 

adopted  a  report  by  Alexander  Hamilton,  calling  for  a  conven- 
tion of  all  the  states  "to  meet  at  Philadelphia,  on  the  second 
Monday  of  May  [1787],  to  consider  the  situation  of  the  United 
States  and  devise  such  further  provisions  as  should  appear 
necessary  to  render  the  constitution  of  the  federal  government 
adequate  to  the  exigencies  of  the  Union." 

The  movement  for  a  new  national  government  was  fairly 
launched.  Virginia  appointed  a  group  of  distinguished  dele- 
gates to  the  convention,  with  George  Washington  at  their  head 
Other  states  followed  suit,  and  Congress  simply  recognized  an 
accomplished  fact  when  it  resolved  that  "on  the  second  Mon- 
day of  May  next  a  convention  of  delegates  shall  be  held  in 
Philadelphia,  for  the  sole  purpose  of  revising  the  Articles 
of  Confederation." 

The  student  should  note  the  revolutionary  character  of  these 
proceedings.  The  call  of  the  state  legislatures  and  the  resolves 
of  self-summoned  conventions  reminds  one  of  the  Committees 
of  Safety  and  of  Correspondence  in  the  early  Revolutionary 
days.  The  regular  Congress  of  the  United  States,  its  legal 
government,  sitting  in  New  York  from  1785  to  1789,  was  not 
the  source  from  which  the  movement  for  a  new  Constitution 
came.  That  impotent  body  had  tried  in  vain  to  get  the  states 
to  grant  it  powers  of  taxation  and  commercial  regulation ;  and 
now  the  leaders  (Hamilton,  Madison,  Washington,  Jay)  turned 
to  other  ways.1  That  many  of  them  were  determined  to  make 
the  commercial  reforms  only  the  entering  wedge  for  the  com- 
plete abolition  of  the  Articles  of  Confederation  we  know  from 
their  correspondence.  "I  consider  the  convention  at  Annapolis 
the  most  important  aera  in  our  affairs,"  wrote  Monroe  to  Madi- 
son; "the  Eastern  men,  be  assured,  mean  it  as  leading  further 
than  the  object  [commerce]  originally  comprehended."  Madi- 
son, writing  to  Jefferson  in  Paris,  August  17,  1786,  confesses 
his  sympathy  with  "many  Gentlemen  both  within  and  without 
Congress"  who  wished  to  use  the  Annapolis  meeting  to  bring 

Professor  Burgess  goes  so  far  as  to  use  the  phrase  coup  d'etat  (a  sudden 
change  of  government  by  revolutionary  conspiracy)  to  designate  the  Annapolis 
meeting. 


138  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

about  an  amendment  of  the  Articles;  but  he  despairs,  in  the 
present  crisis,  of  "anything  beyond  a  commercial  reform." 

The  character  of  the  statesmen  chosen  as  delegates  to  the 
Constitutional  Convention,  the  tone  of  alarm  in  the  letters  of 
the  chief  men  of  the  period,  and  the  prevalence  of  public  writ- 
ings urging  the  need  for  drastic  measures,  all  point  to  the 
momentous  significance  of  the  Philadelphia  meeting  of  1787. 
The  men  who  assembled  in  the  hall  of  the  statehouse  where 
some  of  them,  eleven  years  earlier,  had  signed  the  Declaration 
of  Independence1  fully  realized  the  solemnity  of  the  situation. 
"America  has  certainly  upon  this  occasion  drawn  forth  her 
first  characters,"  wrote  George  Mason  to  his  son;  "the  eyes 
of  the  United  States  are  turned  upon  this  assembly,  and  their 
expectations  raised  to  a  very  anxious  degree.  May  God  grant 
we  may  be  able  to  gratify  them  by  establishing  a  wise  and 
just  government." 

The  moment  the  Convention  had  finished  its  preliminary 

work  of  organization  Governor  Randolph  of  Virginia  presented 

fifteen  resolutions,  designed  ostensibly  for  the  correction  and 

enlargement  of  the  Articles  of  Confederation,  but  in  reality 

demanding  a  new  Constitution  (May  29).   They  provided  for 

)  a  national  legislature  of  two  branches,  for  a  national  executive 

/  to  be  chosen  by  the  legislature,  and  for  a  national  judiciary,  also 

I  chosen  by  the  legislature,  to  hold  office  during  good  behavior. 

iMost  significant  of  all,  they  provided  for  the  extension  of  the 

new  authority  over  the  whole  Union  by  the  resolution  (No.  14) 

that  the  various  officers  "within  the  several  states  ought  to  be 

bound  by  oath  to  support  the  articles  of  union."    The  Virginia 

resolutions  were  carried  point  by  point  in  the  first  two  weeks 

of  the  debate,  and  it  looked  as  though  a  Constitution  not 

differing  much  from  the  one  under  which  we  live  might  be  the 

rapid  and  peaceful  result  of  the  labors  of  the  Convention,  until 

the  resolution  was  reached  which  provided  that  representation 

in  the  second  branch  of  tfre  legislature  (the  Senate)  should  be 

1  These  were  Roger  Sherman  of  Connecticut,  George  Read  of  Delaware,  Benja- 
min Franklin,  Robert  Morris,  George  Clymer,  and  James  Wilson  of  Pennsylvania, 
and  Elbridge  Gerry  of  Massachusetts.  Gerry  refused  to  sign  the  Constitution. 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT       139 

proportioned  to  population,  as  in  the  first  branch  (the  House). 
The  smaller  states — New  York,  New  Jersey,  Connecticut,  Del- 
aware, Maryland — rebelled  against  this  provision  and  pre- 
sented through  Patterson  of  New  Jersey  a  counter  plan  "for 
revising,  correcting,  and  enlarging  the  Articles  of  Confeder- 
ation" without  giving  up  their  essential  feature,  the  equality 
of  the  states.  The  New  Jersey  plan  approved  the  creation  of 
executive  and  legislative  departments ;  it  gave  Congress  powers 
of  taxation ;  it  even  allowed  the  central  government  to  call 
on  the  forces  of  the  confederated  states  to  coerce  any  recal- 
citrant state  or  persons  in  a  state  into  obedience  to  national 
legislation.  But  it  clung  tenaciously  to  the  Jederal  as  opposed 
to  the  national  form  of  government.  Congress  must  still  con- 
sist of  representatives  of  the  states,  not  of  the  people ;  and  each 
state  in  Congress  must  have  a  single  and  equal  vote.  '"We 
would  sooner  submit  to  a  foreign  power,"  said  John  Dickinson 
of  Delaware  to  Madison,  "than  submit  to  be  deprived  in  both 
branches  of  the  legislature  of  equality  of  suffrage,  and  thereby 
be  thrown  under  the  dominion  of  the  larger  states." 

This,  then,  was  the  crucial  question  of  the  Convention :  How 
can  power  be  reconciled  with  liberty  ?  For  the  larger  states  the 
only  promise  of  vigor  in  the  government  was  in  its  direct  action 
on  the  people  of  the  land;  for  the  smaller  states  the  only 
guarantee  of  liberty  was  in  the  maintenance  of  an  absolute 
equality  of  each  state  in  the  federal  council  of  the  nation.  "If 
New  Jersey  will  not  part  with  her  sovereignty,"  said  James 
Wilson  of  Pennsylvania,  "it  is  vain  to  talk  of  government.  .  .  . 
We  must  forget  our  local  habits  and  attachments,  lay  aside 
our  state  connections,  and  act  for  the  general  good  of  the 
whole."  Ellsworth  of  Connecticut  was  immediately  on  his  feet 
in  behalf  of  the  small-state  men  to  urge  "the  necessity  of  main- 
taining the  existence  and  agency  of  the  states,"  in  order  to 
preserve  a  republican  government  over  so  large  a  country. 

It  looked  as  though  the  Convention  would  go  to  pieces  over 
this  question.  Martin  of  Maryland  reported,  on  June  28,  that 
it  was  on  the  verge  of  dissolution,  "scarce  held  together  by 
the  strength  of  a  hair,"  and  Franklin,  little  inclined  to  seek 


140  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

divine  aid  until  every  human  resource  had  been  tried,  proposed 
that  the  sessions  should  be  opened  with  prayer.  The  serious- 
ness of  the  secession  of  the  group  of  small  states  on  the  middle 
Atlantic  seaboard,  with  their  invaluable  harbor  of  New  York, 
can  be  seen  at  a  glance.  Gunning  Bedford  of  Delaware  de- 
clared openly  that  the  small  states  would  turn  to  foreign  powers 
"who  were  ready  to  take  them  by  the  hand,"  rather  than  unite 
on  the  purely  national  plan  advocated  by  Morris,  King,  and 
Wilson.  The  Convention  appointed  a  committee  of  thirteen, 
one  member  from  each  state,  to  effect  a  compromise  and  ad- 
journed over  the  Fourth  of  July.  On  the  next  day  the  com- 
mittee recommended  that  representation  be  proportional  to 
the  population  in  the  House  and  equal  (two  members  from 
each  state)  in  the  Senate.  The  lower  House,  as  the  popular 
body,  was  to  have  the  exclusive  right  to  initiate  revenue  bills. 
After  ten  days  of  bitter  debate  this  great  compromise  of  the 
Constitution  was  adopted  (July  16)  by  a  vote  of  five  states 
to  four.  Thus  the  fundamental  character  of  our  government 
was  determined — partly  national,  partly  federal. 

Conflicts  of  interest  on  the  part  of  sections  or  of  economic 
classes  were  settled,  or  at  least  quieted,  by  further  compromises. 
The  slaves,  whom  the  Southerners  wished  to  have  counted  as 
population,  but  who,  of  course,  had  no  political  or  civil  rights, 

| .  were  finally  reckoned  at  three  fifths  of  their  actual  number  in 
computing  the  federal  ratio  for  representation  in  the  House ;  so 
that  a  state  which  had  a  population  of  200,000  white  and  100,000 
blacks  would  send  to  Congress  representatives  for  260,000 
inhabitants.  The  regulation  of  commerce,  which  the  agricul- 
tural class  wished  to  have  determined  by  a  two-thirds  vote  in 
Congress,  lest  excessive  taxes  be  levied  under  the  form  of  cus- 
toms duties,  was  left  to  a  simple  majority  vote,  but  at  the 
same  time  the  producers  were  favored  by  a  clause  forbidding 

U  Congress  to  lay  duties  on  exports.  On  July  26  the  Convention 
referred  twenty-three  resolutions,  the  practical  embodiment  of 
the  Virginia  plan,  to  a  committee  of  detail,  consisting  of  Rut- 
ledge,  Wilson,  Ellsworth,  Gorham,  and  Randolph.  With  the 
resolutions  went  the  New  Jersey  plan  and  a  plan  of  Thomas 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        141 

Pinckney  of  South  Carolina.1  The  committee  reported  two 
weeks  later,  laying  a  rough  copy  of  a  constitution  in  "  broad- 
sides" on  the  desk  of  each  member.  For  another  month  the 
clauses  were  debated.  On  September  12  the  Constitution  in  its 
present  form  (save  for  the  amendments)  was  returned  from 
the  committee  on  style,  with  the  evidence  of  Gouverneur 
Morris's  handiwork  in  its  clear  and  succinct  phraseology.  On 
the  seventeenth  the  engrossed  copy  was  signed  by  39  of  the  42 
members  present  at  the  Convention  and  was  transmitted  to 
Congress  to  be  sent  to  the  states  for  ratification. 

Opposition  to  the  new  Constitution  was  immediate  and 
widespread.  The  framers,  said  the  critics,  were  representatives 
of  the  propertied  classes  alone  and  had  deliberated  like  an 
aristocratic  assembly  behind  closed  doors.  They  had  gone 
beyond  their  powers  in  writing  a  totally  new  Constitution  in- 
stead of  amending  the  Articles,  and  they  had  added  presump- 
tion to  disobedience  by  declaring  that  when  nine  states  ratified 
the  Constitution  it  should  go  into  effect  for  those  states.  Was 
not  that  to  invite  nine  states  to  " secede'7  from  the  Union — 
since  amendments  to  the  Articles  could  be  adopted  only  by  the 
unanimous  consent  of  the  states?  Men  who  had  been  in  the 
forefront  of  the  struggle  with  Great  Britain  opposed  the  new 
Constitution,  because  they  believed  that  it  threatened  our 
hard-earned  liberty  by  the  powers  that  it  granted  to  the  presi- 
dent and  the  federal  courts.  Patrick  Henry  wrote  that  he  could 

1The  Pinckney  plan  has  been  the  subject  of  much  controversy.  Madison  had 
no  copy  of  it,  nor  was  it  contained  in  the  meager  journals  of  the  Convention 
published  in  1818.  John  Quincy  Adams,  Secretary  of  State,  wrote  to  Pinckney 
in  1818,  asking  him  for  a  copy  of  his  plan,  and  in  return  received  from  Pinckney 
a  manuscript  so  like  the  "broadside"  which  had  been  submitted  to  the  members 
of  the  Convention  by  the  reporting  committee  (August  6)  that  historians  have 
been  inclined  to  accuse  Pinckney  of  deliberate  forgery.  However,  the  existence 
of  a  Pinckney  plan  is  undoubted.  Many  sections  occur  in  the  report  of  August  6 
that  were  not  in  the  twenty-three  resolutions ;  and  the  source  of  these  sections 
was  a  mystery  until  Professor  J.  Franklin  Jameson,  in  1902,  discovered  a  leaf 
of  the  Pinckney  plan  inserted  in  a  manuscript  of  James  Wilson — one  of  the 
members  of  the  committee.  It  is  likely  that  Pinckney's  plan  was  used  as  the 
basis  for  the  "broadside"  of  August  6,  and  the  disappearance  of  the  manuscript 
may  have  been  due  to  the  fact  that  it  was  sent  to  the  printer  as  "copy." 


142  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

not  bring  his  mind  to  accord  with  Washington's  letter  of  in- 
dorsement of  the  document.  Richard  Henry  Lee  wrote  the 
" Letters  from  a  Federal  Farmer"  to  expose  the  dangers  of 
consolidated  power  which  he  saw  in  the  Constitution.  He  called 
the  proposed  government  "an  elective  despotism."  Benjamin 
Harrison,  a  signer  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  saw 
only  "the  seeds  of  discord"  in  the  "unlimited  powers  of  tax- 
ation, the  regulation  of  trade,  and  the  jurisdictions  that  are 
to  be  established  in  every  state  altogether  independent  of  their 
laws."  He  thought  that  "the  states  south  of  the  Potomac 
would  be  little  more  than  appendages  to  those  north  of  it"  if 
Congress  by  a  bare  majority  could  control  commerce  and 
taxation  at  will.  Scrupulous  democrats  demanded  a  Bill  of 
Rights  guaranteeing  freedom  of  speech  and  press,  religious 
liberty,  the  right  of  petition,  and  trial  by  jury.  Jealous  states'- 
rights  men  saw  in  the  Constitution  a  threat  of  absorption  by 
the  central  government,  since  the  members  of  Congress,  paid 
from  the  national  Treasury,  would  be  absolved  of  responsibility 
to  their  state,  and  their  oath  of  allegiance  to  the  federal  govern- 
ment would  nullify  their  allegiance  to  their  sovereign  state. 

In  the  face  of  this  varied  and  determined  opposition  the 
campaign  for  ratification  was  waged.  The  defense  of  the 
Constitution  in  the  ratifying  conventions  called  by  the  legis- 
latures of  the  states  fell  chiefy  on  the  shoulders  of  a  few  men 
who  had  been  members  of  the  Constitutional  Convention- 
Wilson  and  the  Morrises  in  Pennsylvania,  Sherman  and  Ells- 
worth in  Connecticut,  King  and  Strong  in  Massachusetts, 
Rutledge  and  the  Pinckneys  in  South  Carolina,  Madison  in 
Virginia,  and  Hamilton  in  New  York.  Washington,  though 
not  in  the  Virginia  ratifying  convention,  was  the  most  influen- 
tial man  in  the  country  in  securing  the  adoption  of  the  Consti- 
tution. His  prestige  was  enormous  and  his  efforts  were  untiring. 
He  won  over  Governor  Randolph,  who  had  refused  to  sign  the 
Constitution  at  Philadelphia.  Mr.  Dpnald,  who  visited  Wash- 
ington at  Mount  Vernon  in  the  summer  of  1788,  wrote,  "I 
never  in  my  life  saw  him  so  keen  for  anything  as  he  is  for 
the  adoption  of  the  new  Constitution."  Even  the  closeness  of 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        143 

the  vote  on  ratification  (187  to  168  in  Massachusetts,  89  to  79 
in  Virginia,  30  to  27  in  New  York)  can  give  no  idea  of  the 
strenuousness  of  the  campaign — a  campaign  fought  with  all 
the  characteristic  weapons  of  eighteenth-century  political  con- 
troversy: personal  vituperation,  venomous  pamphlets,  turgid 
oratory,  hangings  and  burnings  in  effigy,  billingsgate,  bonfires, 
barbecues,  and  bad  verses. 

Out  of  the  mass  of  ephemeral  literature,  however,  there 
emerged  one  work  of  lasting  worth.  Alexander  Hamilton,  in 
his  fight  for  ratification  in  New  York,  invited  Madison  and 
Jay  to  collaborate  with  him  in  a  series  of  articles  explaining 
the  need,  the  nature,  and  the  anticipated  operation  of  the  new 
Constitution.  The  articles  appeared  in  the  winter  and  spring  of 
1787-1788  in  various  New  York  papers,  over  the  signature 
of  "Publius."  Jay  wrote  five  of  them,  explaining  the  function 
of  the  proposed  Constitution  in  foreign  relations.  Madison's 
twenty-nine  papers  dealt  chiefly  with  the  nature  of  the  double 
government  of  state  and  nation,  with  the  relation  of  the  execu- 
tive, legislative,  and  judicial  departments  to  one  another,  and 
the  fortunes  of  federal  systems  in  the  world's  history.  Hamil- 
ton contributed  fifty-one  papers,  emphasizing  our  dire  need 
for  a  worthy  and  respected  central  government,  the  security  to 
all  interests,  foreign  and  domestic,  which  would  result  from  the 
application  of  just  laws  impartially  enforced,  and  the  benefits 
to  our  trade  and  our  Treasury  which  would  inure  from  the  new 
Constitution.  The  articles,  gathered  into  a  volume  under  the 
title  of  "The  Federalist,"  have  been  considered  the  ablest  expo- 
sition of  the  principles  underlying  our  Constitution,  and  one  of 
the  ablest  works  of  political  science  in  the  world's  literature. 

Submitted  to  a  general  popular  vote,  the  Constitution  would 
probably  have  been  defeated.  Its  supporters,  the  propertied 
classes,  were  far  outnumbered  by  the  disfranchised  farmers  and 
the  industrial  workers  in  the  cities.  Even  among  the  voting 
population  itself  the  opposition  was  so  strong  that  only  the 
specter  of  disunion  could  overcome  it.1  However,  by  the  end 

1So  John  Marshall,  an  ardent  supporter  of  the  Constitution  in  the  Virginia 
ratifying  convention,  testifies  in  his  "Life  of  Washington"  (Vol.  II,  p.  127). 


144  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  June,  1788,  nine  state  conventions  had  ratified  the  docu- 
ment, and  the  Constitution  went  into  effect  for  those  states. 
Only  North  Carolina  and  Rhode  Island  refused  to  join  the  new 
government  before  the  inauguration,  the  following  April,  of  its 
first  president,  George  Washington.' 

When  we  analyze  the  motives  for  calling  the  Constitutional 
Convention,  the  method  of  election  of  the  members,  and  the 
printed  records  of  the  debates,  it  is  impossible  to  resist  the  con- 
clusion that  the  Constitution  was  framed  primarily  to  guarantee 
the  interests  of  property  against  the  dangers  of  anarchy,  re- 
pudiation, and  bankruptcy.1  Washington  confessed  that  we 
might  as  well  continue  under  the  old  Confederation  if  the 
new  instrument  failed  "to  do  justice  to  the  public  creditors  and 
retrieve  the  national  character."  So  aristocratic,  indeed,  did  the 
new  Constitution  appear  to  many,  with  its  life  tenure  for  judges, 
its  small  and  powerful  Senate,  its  executive  unhampered  by  a 
responsible  cabinet  or  council,  its  complete  control  of  commerce 
and  currency,  its  machinery  for  the  prompt  suppression  of 
popular  disaffection,  that  it  seemed  rather  an  instrument  for  re- 
straining than  for  expressing  the  popular  will.  "Its  advocates," 
wrote  John  Adams,  "received  the  active  and  steady  cooper- 
ation of  all  that  was  left  in  America  of  attachment  to  the 
mother  country,  as  well  as  of  the  moneyed  interest,  which 
ever  points  to  strong  government  as  surely  as  the  needle 
to  the  pole."  Mellen  Chamberlain  calls  the  Constitution  "the 
triumph  of  the  legitimate  successors  of  the  anti-Revolutionary 
party  of  1775." 

However,  all  discontent  seemed  to  vanish  in  the  general 
rejoicing  which  attended  the  final  ratification  of  the  Consti- 
tution. The  "federal  roof"  was  up  at  last.  Pageants  and  pro- 
cessions, feasting  and  oratory,  were  the  order  of  the  day. 
Allegory  was  called  in  to  supplement  sober  statement.  "The 
good  ship  Constitution"  was  safe  in  port.  "The  sloop  Anarchy" 

irThis  was  the  view  of  John  Adams  and  many  other  "aristocratically  minded" 
men  at  the  time,  and  a  view  that  has  been  developed  by  some  modern  scholars, 
notably  by  Professor  Charles  A.  Beard  in  his  "Economic  Interpretation  of  the 
Constitution"  (1914). 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        145 

had  "gone  ashore  on  the  Union  rock,"  and  "the  old  scow 
Confederacy,  Imbecility  master,"  had  "gone  off  to  sea."  But 
opposition  only  slumbered  a  little  while. to  waken  again,  as 
we  shall  see,  in  Washington's  administration,  against  the 
"monocrats"  and  the  "Anglophiles,"  the  merchants  and  the 
bondholders,  who  were  accused  of  degrading  the  government 
from  the  servant  of  the  whole  people  to  the  slave  of  the 
moneyed  classes. 

The  Constitution  is  brief,  clear,  and  simple.  Its  unique 
virtue  from  the  point  of  view  of  political  science  is  the  device 
by  which  it  secured  the  supremacy  of  the  new  federal  govern- 
ment without  destroying  or  absorbing  the  state  governments. 
Under  the  Confederation  a  state  could  ignore  or  defy  the  meas- 
ures of  Congress  with  impunity.  A  remedy  for  this  chronic  nul- 
lification of  national  laws  was  a  prime  requisite  in  a  new 
constitution.  Various  remedies  were  proposed:  to  have  the 
governor  of  each  state  appointed  under  the  authority  of  the 
United  States;  to  give  the  national  executive  the  right  to  veto 
state  laws  "under  regulations  prescribed  by  the  United  States" ; 
to  give  Congress  the  right  to  coerce  a  disobedient  state.  But 
instead  of  interfering  directly  with  the  officers  or  the  laws  of  the 
states,  or  coercing  a  state  by  force  of  arms  (which,  as  Madison 
urged,  "would  look  more  like  a  declaration  of  war  than  an  in- 
fliction of  punishment"),  the  Convention  devised  the  happy 
expedient  of  enlisting  the  state  authorities  themselves  in  the 
support  of  the  national  government.  The  members  of  state 
legislatures  and  all  the  executive  and  judicial  officers  of  a  state 
were  bound  by  oath  to  support  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  (Art.  VI,  sect.  3),  and  the  state  courts  were  pledged  to 
recognize  the  Constitution  and  the  laws  and  treaties  made  under 
it  as  "the  supreme  law  of  the  land,  .  .  .  anything  in  the  Consti- 
tution or  laws  of  any  State  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding" 
(Art.  VI,  sect.  2).  No  defiance  was  hurled  at  the  states;  no 
direct  orders  were  given  to  them ;  only  a  few  prohibitions  were 
enjoined  upon  them ;  and  no  threat  of  military  punishment  was 
held  over  them.  Still,  the  citizens  of  every  state  were  brought 
individually  and  severally  under  the  authority  of  the  United 


146  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

States  through  the  federal  courts;  and  the  laws  of  any  state 
might  be  set  aside  at  any  time  as  unconstitutional  by  a  decision 
of  the  Supreme  Court,  which  was  the  final  court  of  appeal  in  all 
cases  involving  the  interpretation  of  the  Constitution  (Art.  Ill, 
sects,  i,  2). 

Because  the  guardian  of  our  American  system  of  government 
y  Jias  been  the  federal  judiciary,  rather  than  the  military  arm  or 
an  executive  with  the  power  of  issuing  administrative  decrees, 
the  courts  have  often  been  attacked  in  America  as  the  strong- 
holds of  conservatism,  and  "judge-made  law"  has  been  branded 
as  a  usurpation  of  the  rights  of  the  popularly  elected  legislatures. 
Undoubtedly,  the  danger  of  some  admixture  of  politics  in  our 
theoretically  independent  judiciary  js  the  price  we  have  to  pay 
for  the  maintenance  of  the  law  of  the  land ;  but  it  is  a  small 
price,  after  all,  to  pay  for  freedom  from  subjection  to  a  military 
police  or  to  an  arrogant  group  of  minister-courtiers  around  a 
king  by  divine  right.  It  is  hard  to  imagine  any  agency  or  power 
that  could  have  more  justly  performed  the  difficult  task  of 
adapting  the  Constitution  to  the  various  needs  of  a  rapidly 
growing  democracy  than  the  federal  judiciary,  secured  as  it  is 
by  appointment  and  tenure  from  the  undue  influence  of  tempo- 
rary or  local  legislation  and  yet  truly  national  in  character  from 
its  diffusion  through  all  the  states  of  the  Union. 

Many  extraconstitutional  features  have  developed  in  the 
actual  application  of  the  Constitution.  A  stranger  reading  the 
document  would  be  well  informed  on  such  formal  matters 
as  the  qualifications  of  officers,  the  powers  of  Congress,  the  proc- 
\  ess  of  amendment;  but  of  the  actual  forces  which  move  the 
government  in  state  and  nation  he  would  be  ignorant.  He  would 
find  nothing  in  the  Constitution  about  political  parties,  con- 
ventions, platforms,  and  "  machines."  He  would  have  no  sus- 
picion of  the  immense  power  of  the  Senate  through  its  control 
of  patronage.  He  would  not  know  what  departments  make 
up  the  president's  cabinet  or  how  many  members  there  are  in 
the  Supreme  Court.  He  would  know  nothing  of  the  complicated 
process  by  which  hundreds  of  bills  become  laws  in  every  session 
of  Congress.  He  would  think  that  our  president  is  still  selected 


FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT        147 

by  a  little  group  of  " electors"  meeting  quietly  in  their  respec- 
tive states  and  balloting  for  a  man  of  their  own  choice. 

Although  March  4,  1789,  was  the  day  set  by  the  expiring 
Congress  of  the  Confederation  for  the  inauguration  of  the  new 
government,  it  was  well  into  April  before  the  arrival  of  a 
majority  of  Congress  in  New  York  enabled  the  Houses  to 
organize  and  count  the  electoral  vote.  George  Washington's 
name  was  written  first  on  every  one  of  the  sixty-nine  ballots. 
The  next  highest  vote  (34)  was  for  John  Adams,  who  was  de- 
clared vice  president.  On  April  30  Washington  took  the  oath 
of  office  on  the  balcony  of  Federal  Hall,  New  York,  while  the 
great  throng  that  filled  the  street  below  shouted,  "God  bless 
our  Washington !  Long  live  our  beloved  President ! "  The 
event  marked  the  end  of  an  era.  That  same  April  day  fifteen 
years  before,  the  British  Parliament  had  been  deliberating  the 
first  set  of  measures  framed  for  the  coercion  and  punishment  of 
the  recalcitrant  American  colonies.  The  victory  of  the  men  of 
1 775  in  the  war  insured  us  a  free  field  to  work  out  the  experiment 
of  American  democracy ;  the  victory  of  the  men  of  1 787  in  peace 
secured  a  government  strong  enough  to  preserve  that  democracy 
from  degeneration  into  factional  groups  despised  in  the  eyes  of 
Europe  and  distracted  by  petty  rivalries  at  home.  The  burden  of 
responsibility  borne  by  the  leaders  who  had  labored  for  victory 
in  war  and  order  in  peace  during  this  critical  decade  and  a  half 
had  been  heavy.  Their  letters  are  filled  with  a  courageous 
anxiety  which  bears  witness  to  the  strain  they  had  been  under. 
The  adoption  of  the  Constitution  filled  them  with  a  kind  of  aw- 
ful misgiving,  for  they  knew  at  what  a  price  they  had  won  the 
opportunity  to  prove  their  faith  in  their  political  destiny.  It 
is  no  wonder  that  the  man  who  had  borne  the  greatest  burden 
of  responsibility  in  both  war  and  peace  spoke  in  a  voice  "a 
little  tremulous"  in  his  inaugural  address  to  the  members  of 
the  first  Congress  of  the  United  States  under  the  Constitution : 
"The  preservation  of  the  sacred  fire  of  liberty  and  the  destiny 
of  the  republican  model  of  government  are  justly  considered 
as  deeply,  perhaps  as  finally,  staked  on  the  experiment  intrusted 
to  the  hands  of  the  American  People." 


CHAPTER  IV 
WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS 

The  establishment  of  a  republican  government  on  a  safe  and  solid  basis  is 
the  wish  of  every  honest  man  in  the  United  States,  and  is  an  object  of  all  others 
the  nearest  and  most  dear  to  my  own  heart. — ALEXANDER  HAMILTON 

THE  HAMILTONIAN  SYSTEM 

Six  days-before  the  electors  met  in  their  ten1  respective  states 
to  cast  a  unanimous  vote  for  George  Washington  as  first  presi- 
dent of  the  United  States,  the  man  thus  honored  had  written  to 
General  Pinckney,  "For  my  own  part,  I  am  entirely  per- 
suaded that  the  present  general  government  will  endeavor  to 
lay  the  foundations  for  its  proceedings  in  national  justice,  faith, 
and  honor."  Called  himself  a  few  weeks  later  to  take  the  oath 
of  office  as  chief  magistrate  of  the  new  "general  government," 
he  fulfilled  this  prophetic  pledge  with  the  utmost  fidelity. 
Justice,  faith,  and  honor  were  the  ideals  which  inspired  George 
Washington  his  life  long,  and  firmness,  diligence,  and  the  long 
patience  which  is  akin  to  genius  were  the  qualities  of  character 
which  those  ideals  produced.  Far  less  creative  than  Hamilton 
and  far  less  learned  than  Jefferson,  without  Franklin's  wit  or 
Henry's  eloquence,  Washington  was  still  the  acknowledged 
master  of  them  all  in  the  superb  balance  of  deed  and  thought, 
of  reason  and  action,  with  which  he  pursued  his  even  way  in 
all  vicissitudes  of  fortune.  Most  men  as  courageous  would 
have  been  precipitate  in  action ;  most  men  as  deliberate  would 
have  been  vacillating  in  counsel.  But  Washington  was  equally 
removed  from  exaltation  and  despair.  "Of  all  the  great  men 
in  history,"  says  Lecky,  "he  was  the  most  invariably  judicious." 

iNorth  Carolina  did  not  enter  the  Union  until  November,  1789,  and  Rhode 
Island  until  the  following  May.  In  New  York  a  deadlock  between  the  senate 
and  the  assembly  prevented  the  choice  of  presidential  electors  in  1789. 

148 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  149 

His  ambitions  were  all  weighted  with  a  sense  of  the  responsibil- 
ities which  they  brought,  and  his  labors  lightened  by  the  quiet, 
constant  faith  that  they  were  contributing  to  the  eventual 
success  of  the  newly  founded  democracy,  "the  last  great  experi- 
ment for  promoting  human  happiness  by  a  reasonable  compact 
in  civil  society."  His  aims  were  all  his  country's.1 

When  Washington  read  his  inaugural  speech  before  the 
members  of  the  first  Congress  in  Federal  Hall,  New  York,  the 
total  government  of  the  United  States  was  represented  there. 
The  departments,  jurisdictions,  courts,  and  embassies  which 
were  necessary  for  the  execution  of  the  powers  conferred  on  the 
president  and  Congress  by  the  Constitution  had  to  be  created 
by  law  and  manned  by  secretaries,  judges,  marshals,  collectors 
of  customs,  postmasters,  military  officers,  territorial  governors, 
Indian  commissioners,  foreign  ministers  and  consuls,  and  a  host 
of  minor  officials  and  clerks.  The  dissolution  of  the  old  Con- 
gress had  put  an  end  to  all  its  feeble  organs  of  government. 
The  requisitions  on  the  states  ceased,  leaving  the  new  govern- 
ment without  a  penny  of  income.  The  only  bequest  from  the 
Confederation  was  a  debt,  which  the  new  Constitution  assumed 
in  full. 

The  most  imperative  need  of  the  new  government  was  a 
revenue;  and  on  the  very  day  after  the  first  Congress  was 
organized,  without  waiting  even  for  the  inauguration  of  the 
president,  the  House  of  Representatives  proceeded  to  the  dis- 
cussion of  a  tariff.  James  Madison  of  Virginia,  the  leading 
member  of  the  House,  brought  in  a  bill  imposing  moderate 
duties  (averaging  about  8  per  cent)  on  sugar,  molasses,  tea, 
coffee,  wine,  salt,  glass,  nails,  and  other  imports.  Although  the 
bill  was  described  in  the  preamble  as  "An  Act  for  the  en- 
couragement and  protection  of  Manufactures,"  the  protective 

!The  finest  delineation  of  Washington's  character  in  brief  compass  is  a  letter 
written  by  Thomas  Jefferson  to  Dr.  Walter  Jones  in  January,  1814.  It  is  the 
more  remarkable  as  the  tribute  of  a  man  whose  political  tenets  were  opposed 
to  Washington's  and  whose  personal  relations  during  the  later  years  of  Wash- 
ington's life  were  not  the  most  cordial.  The  letter  may  be  found  in  H.  S.  Ran- 
dall's "Life  of  Thomas  Jefferson,"  Vol.  Ill,  p.  641,  or  in  P.  L.  Ford's  edition  of 
"Writings  of  Jefferson,"  Vol.  IX,  p.  446. 


150  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

elements  in  it  were  only  slight.  It  was  the  need  of  revenue  which 
Madison  urged  in  his  speech,  to  meet  our  financial  obligations 
and  to  revive  among  us  "the  dormant  principles  of  our  honor 
and  honesty."  There  was  no  recourse  in  the  debate  on  the 
bill  to  the  stock  arguments  of  the  protectionist:  high  wages 
and  the  American  standard  of  living.  But  one  kind  of  protec- 
tion the  bill  effected  immediately.  Importers  of  large  consign- 
ments of  goods  from  Europe  secured  the  postponement  of  the 
operation  of  the.  act  until  their  cargoes  should  have  landed,  and 
at  the  same  time  put  up  the  prices  of  the  goods  to  accord  with 
the  tariff.  The  consumers  paid  the  bill.  In  spite  of  the  recom- 
mendations of  our  first  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  Alexander 
Hamilton,  for  a  high  protective  duty,  in  his  Report  on  Manu- 
factures, of  December,  1791,  the  tariff  remained  low  until  the 
need  of  extraordinary  revenue  for  war  raised  it  to  protective 
levels. 

The  three  executive  departments  of  State  (foreign  affairs), 
Treasury,  and  War  were  organized  in  the  summer  months  of 
1789,  and  Thomas  Jefferson,  Alexander  Hamilton,  and  Henry 
Knox  were  appointed  as  the  respective  incumbents.  Edmund 
Randolph  of  Virginia  was  named  Attorney-General  and  took 
part  with  the  executive  secretaries  in  the  cabinet  meetings, 
though  the  Department  of  Justice  was  not  organized  by  Con- 
gress until  1870.  The  heads  of  departments  did  not  form  a 
"cabinet"  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word.  They  were  not,  like 
European  ministries,  an  executive  committee,  drawn  from  the 
legislature,  and  responsible  to  the  legislature  in  the  shaping  of 
national  policy,  nor  were  they  recognized  in  any  corporate 
capacity  by  Congress  or  the  Constitution.  The  president,  ac- 
cording to  the  Constitution,  might  "require  their  opinion  in 
writing  .  .  .  upon  any  subject  relating  to  the  duties  of  their 
respective  offices,"  but  he  was  not  obliged  to  consult  them  in 
a  body.  Washington  did  often  ask  opinions  of  his  secretaries 
privately  and  separately,  but  under  Jefferson  the  habit  became 
fixed  of  assembling  the  cabinet  at  stated  times  for  joint  deliber- 
ation and  advice  on  the  policies  of  the  administration.  It  was 
not  until  the  middle  of  President  Roosevelt's  second  term 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  151 

(1907)  that  the  cabinet  received  official  recognition  as  a  part 
of  our  constitutional  machinery. 

A  Judiciary  Act,  prepared  mainly  by  Oliver  Ellsworth  of  Con- 
necticut and  passed  September  24,  1789,  organized  the  Supreme 
Court  and  erected  federal  district  and  circuit  courts.  Washing- 
ton designated  John  Jay  of  New  York  as  Chief  Justice  of  the 
Supreme  Court  and  named  among  the  five  associate  justices 
such  distinguished  men  as  James  Wilson  of  Pennsylvania,  John 
Rutledge  of  South  Carolina,  and  James  Blair  of  Virginia.  In 
accordance  with  the  clause  of  the  Constitution  (Art.  Ill,  sect.  2, 
par.  2)  which  gives  Congress  power  to  regulate  the  appellate 
jurisdiction  of  the  Supreme  Court,  the  Judiciary  Act  conferred 
on  the  court  the  enormous  power  of  reviewing  the  decisions 
of  state  courts  as  to  the  constitutionality  of  statutes — a  power 
which  Senator  McClay  declared  was  designed  "to  swallow  by 
degrees  all  the  state  .judiciaries."  From  this  famous  twenty- 
fifth  clause  of  the  Judiciary  Act  has  been  developed  the  practice 
of  the  Supreme  Court  (the  "guardian  of  the  Constitution")  in 
declaring  null  and  void  acts  of  the  state  legislatures  and  Con- 
gress which  conflict  with  the  Constitution.  The  review  of  state 
laws  and  decisions  by  the  Supreme  Court  led  to  many  contro- 
versies, in  our  earlier  history  especially,  between  the  advocates 
of  states'  rights  and  the  champions  of  national  sovereignty. 

A  multitude  of  minor  matters  were  adjusted  in  the  busy 
summer  session  of  the  first  Congress.  Hundreds  of  offices  were 
created  in  connection  with  the  great  departments.  The  salaries 
of  congressmen  and  executive  officials  were  fixed.  The  location 
of  the  new  capital  was  discussed.  The  president  (but  only  by 
the  casting  vote  of  Vice  President  Adams  in  the  Senate)  was 
given  the  power  to  remove  heads  of  departments  and  other  ap- 
pointive officers  at  his  own  discretion.  The  hundred  and  more 
amendments  to  the  Constitution  suggested  by  the  states  in  their 
ratifying  conventions  were  boiled  down  to  twelve  and  passed 
by  Congress.  Ten  of  these  twelve  were  ratified  by  the  necessary 
three  fourths  of  the  states  and  appear  as  the  first  ten  amend- 
ments of  our  Constitution.  On  September  29,  1789,  Congress 
adjourned  until  the  following  January. 


152  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Quite  as  important  as  formal  acts  of  Congress  in  determining 
the  character  of  our  government  were  a  number  of  precedents 
established  in  the  opening  days  of  our  national  history.  The 
French  minister,  the  count  of  Moustier,  tried  to  get  Washing- 
ton's ear  for  a  private  audience,  but  the  president  with  firm 
and  kindly  tact  held  the  minister  to  the  custom  of  civilized 
nations  of  communicating  their  business  in  writing  and  through 
the  proper  channel  of  the  foreign  office.  Congress  too  asserted 
its  independence  of  the  executive.  Jealous  of  its  constitutional 
right  of  initiating  revenue  measures,  the  House  limited  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury  to  the  preparation  of  reports  to  be 
presented  for  its  consideration.  It  refused  to  allow  Hamilton 
to  appear  on  the  floor  in  person  to  recommend  his  measures, 
since  he  was  not  a  member  of  Congress  nor  amenable  to  its 
control  except  through  the  extreme  and  unusual  process  of 
impeachment.  Hamilton's  friends,  who  wanted  to  see  him  play 
the  part  of  an  English  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  were  not 
a  little  nettled  at  this  democratic  opposition.  Even  Washing- 
ton's presence  at  the  side  of  Secretary  Knox  in  the  Senate, 
where  they  had  come  to  explain  an  Indian  treaty,  failed  to 
secure  a  favorable  reception  for  the  Secretary  of  War.  Both 
Washington  and  Knox  withdrew  from  the  Senate  chamber  in 
considerable  embarrassment.  A  few  years  later  Fisher  Ames 
complained  that  the  heads  of  administrative  departments,  in- 
stead of  forming  a  real  ministry,  which  might  "impart  a  kind 
of  momentum  to  the  operation  of  the  laws,"  were  only  "chief 
clerks."  Whether  it  was  wiser  or  not  for  Congress  to  keep  the 
executive  officers  at  arm's  length  is  a  question  on  which  critics 
differ.  It  is  the  feature  which  differentiates  our  constitutional 
system  most  sharply  from  those  of  the  responsible  governments 
of  Europe. 

Congress  assembled  for  its  second  session  on  January  4,  1790. 
Ten  days  later  it  listened  to  Alexander  Hamilton's  First  Report 
on  the  Public  Credit.  Hamilton  was  a  financial  genius  of  the 
first  order,  endowed  with  "a  powerful  imagination  for  facts." 
To  the  capacity  for  sustained  and  close  thinking  inherited  from 
his  Scotch  father  he  added  his  French  mother's  vivacity, 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  153 

amiability,  and  charm.  He  had  come  to  New  York  at  the  age  of 
fifteen  from  his  birthplace  in  the  British  West  Indian  island 
of  Nevis  to  enter  King's  College  (Columbia),  and  forthwith 
he  devoted  his  precocious  talents  as  a  writer  and  speaker  to  the 
cause  of  the  American  colonies,  which  was  then  rapidly  moving 
to  its  crisis.  His  services  in  the  field  and  the  council  chamber 
during  the  American  Revolution  were  considerable.  In  the 
later  years  of  the  war  and  during  the  critical  period  that 
followed  he  was  assiduous  in  the  study  of  finance  and  tireless 
in  the  recommendation  of  measures  to  strengthen  the  govern- 
ment and  revive  its  languishing  credit.  In  1780,  at  the  age  of 
twenty-three,  he  wrote  a  long  letter  to  our  leading  financier, 
Robert  Morris,  on  the  need  for  the  establishment  of  a  national 
bank.  In  the  same  year,  in  a  remarkable  letter  to  James 
Duane,  he  analyzed  the  causes  of  the  weakness  of  the  Con- 
federation and  proposed  as  a  remedy  a  scheme  of  national 
government  in  which  many  of  the  features  of  the  Constitution 
of  1787  were  anticipated.  He  was  chairman  of  a  committee 
of  Congress  to  report  on  an  impost  duty  in  1782,  and  a  few 
years  later  in  the  legislature  of  New  York  he  fought  valiantly 
to  persuade  the  state  to  surrender  to  the  Union  sources  of 
revenue  sufficient  to  enable  it  to  discharge  its  obligations.  "  For 
how,"  said  he,  "can  our  national  character  be  preserved  with- 
out paying  our  debts,  or  our  Union  continue  to  exist  without 
revenues  ?  "  It  was  as  no  tyro  in  finance,  then,  but  as  a  master 
that  the  young  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  came  forward  in 
January,  1790,  with  his  program  for  the  establishment  of  our 
national  credit. 

"There  is  probably,"  says  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  "no  single 
state  paper  in  the  history  of  the  United  States,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  the  Emancipation  Proclamation,  which  was  of  such 
immense  importance  and  produced  such  wide  and  far-reaching 
results  as  Hamilton's  First  Report  on  the  Public  Credit." 
The  long  document1  may  be  divided  into  two  main  parts: 

irThe  Report  is  printed  in  full  in  H.  C.  Lodge's  Federal  edition  of  the  "Works 
of  Alexander  Hamilton,"  Vol.  II,  pp.  227-289. 


154  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

What  are  the  obligations  of  the  United  States  ?  and  How  shall 
those  obligations  be  met?  In  dealing  with  the  first  question 
the  Secretary  showed  the  grandeur  and  courage  of  his  convic- 
tions, and  in  dealing  with  the  second  he  showed  the  resourceful- 
ness and  ingenuity  of  his  imagination.  We  owed  $11,710,378 
to  foreign  creditors.  Nobody  doubted  that  this  part  of  our 
debt  "  ought  to  be  provided  for  according  to  the  precise  terms 
of  the  contracts  relating  to  it."  The  domestic  debt,  with  arrears 
of  interest  equal  to  half  the  principal,  amounted  to  $40,414,085. 
The  interest-bearing  certificates-  representing  this  part  of  the 
debt  had  so  depreciated  in  value,  as  the  embarrassments  of  the 
government  thickened,  that  they  sold  on  the  speculative  market 
of  1 789  for  only  a  quarter  of  their  face  value.  Hamilton  insisted 
that  the  Treasury  redeem  these  certificates  at  their  full  value. 
The  United  States  had  pledged  itself  to  pay  the  amount  written 
on  the  note  and  must  pay  that  amount  to  the  penny,  no  matter 
who  held  the  note.  If  this  enriched  the  speculator  who  had 
bought  the  certificates  for  25  per  cent  of  their  par  value,  that 
was  the  punishment  of  the  original  holders  who  had  had  so  little 
faith  in  their  government  as  to  sell  its  securities  cheap.  They 
must  learn  once  for  all  that  the  new  government  of  the  United 
States  would  not  start  out  with  a  policy  of  repudiation.  The 
Constitution  (Art.  VI,  sect,  i)  declared  that  "all  debts  con- 
tracted and  engagements  entered  into"  before  its  adoption 
should  be  as  "valid  against  the  United  States  under  this  Consti- 
tution as  under  the  Confederation."  Congress  was  forbidden, 
then,  by  the  fundamental  law  of  the  land  to  pay  less  than  the 
full  value  of  its  debt.  As  for  the  plan,  urged  by  Madison  and 
others,  that  the  government  pay  the  present  holders  what  the 
certificates  had  cost  them  plus  the  accrued  interest  from  the 
date  of  purchase,  and  pay  the  balance  to  the  original  holders, 
Hamilton  found  it  impolitic  and  "replete  with  absurd  as  well 
as  inequitable  consequences."  Even  if  the  original  holders 
could  be  traced,  how  could  it  be  proved  whether  they  had  actu- 
ally profited  or  lost  by  realizing  a  certain  amount  on  their 
securities  at  a  certain  time.  Perhaps  the  money  was  worth 
more  to  them  then  than  the  full  value  of  the  certificates  would 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  155 

be  now.  In  short,  the  matter  was  so  complicated  that  the 
government  could  never  hope  to  adjust  it  equitably.  With 
buyers  and  sellers  in  the  security  market  it  could  not  pretend 
to  deal.  All  it  could  or  should  do  was  to  pay  its  debt  as  pledged. 
But  this  policy  seemed  to  Hamilton's  opponents  to  put  a  pre- 
mium on  speculation  in  the  public  funds,  to  make  the  Treasury 
the  ally  of  the  capitalist,  and  still  further  to  enrich,  at  public 
expense,  the  rich  man  who  had  taken  advantage  of  the  need  of 
the  poor  to  " filch  away"  their  substance  for  a  pittance. 

The  next  proposition  of  the  Secretary  was  even  more  start- 
ling. Owing  to  the  inability  of  the  old  Congress  to  command 
the  resources  of  the  country  through  taxation,  the  several  states 
had  been  obliged  to  incur  debts  during  the  Revolution  for 
the  defense  of  their  territory.  These  debts,  amounting  to 
$18,271,786,  Hamilton  proposed  should  be  "assumed  by  the 
Union"  on  the  grounds,  of  "sound  policy  and  substantial 
justice."  The  justice  of  the  policy  of  assumption  lay  in  the  fact 
that  the  debts  had  been  incurred  by  the  states  for  the  common 
cause  of  the  Union ;  the  sound  policy  of  the  measure  was  con- 
tained in  the  assurance  that  "if  the  public  creditors  receive 
their  dues  from  one  source,  distributed  with  an  equal  hand,  .  .  . 
they  will  unite  in  the  fiscal  arrangements  of  the  government." 
If  the  states  retained  their  debts  they  would  have  to  compete 
with  the  central  government  in  raising  large  annual  revenues. 
This  would  lead  to  "mutual  jealousy  and  opposition"  and  seem 
to  put  a  double  burden  of  taxation  on  the  people.  Moreover, 
the  Constitution  having  taken  from  the  states  the  most  abun- 
dant source  of  revenue  in  the  tariff  duties  (Art.  I,  sect.  10, 
par.  2),  it  was  only  fair  that  the  general  government  should 
relieve  them  from  the  burden  of  their  debt. 

In  the  second  half  of  his  Report  Hamilton  set  forth  his  plan 
for  meeting  the  debt.  Annual  interest  charges  at  the  current 
rates  of  4^  and  5  per  cent  on  the  foreign  debt  and  6  per  cent  on 
the  domestic  debt  would  amount  to  $4,587,444.  This  amount 
Hamilton  reduced  to  $2,239,163  by  his  funding  operations,  a 
complicated  set  of  measures  based  on  the  expectation  that 
within  five  years  the  credit  of  the  United  States  would  enable 


156  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

it  to  borrow  at  5  per  cent  and  within  twenty  years  at  4  per  cent. 
The  holders  of  the  old  loan  certificates  could  exchange  them  at 
the  Treasury  for  various  options,  including  annuities,  grants  of 
public  land,  bonds  bearing  interest  from  date,  and  "deferred 
stock"  paying  interest  after  the  year  1800.  For  meeting  the 
current  expenses  of  the  government  and  interest  on  the  debt 
Hamilton  proposed  to  add  to  the  existing  duties  on  imports  and 
tonnage  additional  taxes  on  wines,  liquors,  tea,  and  coffee  which 
would  yield  over  $1,500,000.  In  closing  he  urged  upon  the 
House  the  great  importance  of  making  provision  to  meet  our 
obligations  without  delay,  in  order  "to  give  a  better  impression 
of  the  good  faith  of  the  country,  to  bring  earlier  relief  to  the 
creditors,  and  to  prevent  the  further  depreciation  of  the  gov- 
ernment stock  through  speculation,"  by  which  "millions  would 
probably  be  lost  to  the  United  States." 

The  contest  in  the  House  over  Hamilton's  Report  was  a  bitter 
one,  centering  chiefly  in  the  project  for  the  assumption  of  the 
state  debts.  States  with  heavy  obligations  (Massachusetts. 
South  Carolina,  Connecticut)  naturally  favored  assumption, 
while  those  which  either  had  never  contracted  a  large  debt  or 
had  succeeded  in  paying  off  most  of  their  debt  (New  Hampshire, 
Maryland,  Georgia,  Virginia)  were  against  the  measure.  The 
Secretary's  solicitude  for  the  relief  of  the  states,  said  his  oppo- 
nents, was  only  a  hypocritical  pretext  to  cover  his  real  purpose ; 
namely,  the  addition  of  another  $20,000,000  to  the  already  in- 
flated debt  of  $54,000,000,  to  make  doubly  sure  the  perpet- 
ual alliance  of  the  federal  government  with  the  men  of  wealth 
who  would  absorb  its  enormous  issues  of  securities.  And,  in- 
deed, Hamilton  had  put  himself  on  record  again  and  again  as 
an  advocate  of  such  an  alliance.  "The  only  plan,"  he  wrote  to 
Robert  Morris  in  1780,  "that  can  preserve  the  country  is  one 
that  will  make  it  the  immediate  interest  of  the  moneyed  men  to 
cooperate  with  the  government  in  its  support."  And  again,  in 
the  famous  letter  of  the  same  year  to  Duane:  "The  only 
certain  manner  to  obtain  a  permanent  paper  credit  is  to  en- 
gage the  moneyed  interests  immediately  on  it,  by  making  them 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  157 

contribute  the  whole  or  part  of  the  stock  and  giving  them  the 
whole  or  part  of  the  profits."  Furthermore,  Hamilton  wished 
the  debt  to  be  perpetual,  since  he  would  allow  Congress  to 
redeem  but  2  per  cent  of  it  in  any  year.  A  perpetual  debt 
meant  a  perpetual  control  of  the  government  by  the  capitalists. 
It  was  the  introduction  of  the  British  system  of  finance. 

The  assumption  measure  seemed  lost  when  the  North 
Carolina  delegates,  who  arrived  on  the  floor  of  Congress  in 
April,  1790,  cast  their  votes  against  it.  But  Hamilton,  always 
fertile  in  resource,  found  a  way  out.  Thomas  Jefferson  had 
lately  arrived  in  New  York  to  take  up  his  duties  as  Secretary 
of  State.  Hamilton  waylaid  him  one  morning  on  the  way  to  an 
interview  with  Washington,  and  walked  him  "backwards  and 
forwards  before  the  president's  door  for  a  half  an  hour,"  pathet- 
ically "  painting  the  temper  into  which  the  legislature  had  been 
wrought,  the  disgust  of  those  who  were  called  the  creditor  states, 
and  the  danger  of  the  secession  of  their  members  and  the  sepa- 
ration of  the  states."  Jefferson,  flattered  at  being  sought  as  an 
arbiter  on  the  threshold  of  his  cabinet  career,  invited  Hamilton 
and  a  few  influential  friends  to  dinner,  and  a  bargain  was  struck 
over  the  wine,  by  which  the  Secretary  of  State  agreed  to  secure 
some  Southern  votes  for  assumption  in  return  for  Hamilton's 
influence  in  getting  the  national  capital  established  on  the  banks 
of  the  Potomac.  Jefferson  realized  later,  to  his  horror,  that  he 
had  contributed  to  the  policy  of  fixing  the  "octopus"  of  the 
money  power  on  the  government,  and  complained  that  he  had 
been  "duped"  by  Hamilton  before  he  had  had  time  to  grasp  the 
importance  of  the  measure.  But  as  Jefferson  had  been  in  the 
country  since  the  preceding  Christmas  and  was  an  exceptionally 
close  student  of  political  affairs,  it  seems  as  though  he  might 
have  divined  the  purport  of  the  assumption  bill  before  the  end 
of  May.  On  July  26,  1790,  assumption  was  carried  through 
the  House  by  a  vote  of  32  to  29,  and  the  end  of  the  summer 
saw  the  realization  of  the  whole  program  of  Hamilton's  Report. 
It  was  perhaps  the  most  fateful  legislation  in  our  history  until 
the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century. 


158  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Three  other  important  reports  to  Congress  complete  the 
Hamiltonian  system.  On  December  13,  1790,  a  second  Report 
on  the  Public  Credit  was  submitted,  which, discussed  means  of 
increasing  the  revenue  and  recommended  an  elaborate  system 
of  excise  duties  on  wines  and  spirits.  At  the  same  time  the 
famous  report  advocating  the  establishment  of  a  National 
Bank  was  presented.  At  the  opening  of  the  second  Congress 
(December,  1791)  a  Report  on  Manufactures  was  sent  in,  rec- 
ommending a  protective  tariff.  The  Report  on  Manufactures 
was  not  adopted,  but  the  excise  and  the  Bank  were  put  through 
Congress.1 

A  National  Bank  in  some  shape  or  other,  which  should  unite 
private  and  public  funds  "to  erect  a  mass  of  credit  that  would 
supply  the  defect  of  moneyed  capital  and  answer  all  the  pur- 
poses of  cash,"  had  been  for  a  decade  a  project  of  Hamilton's. 
The  Bank,  he  urged,  would  effect  the  augmentation  of  active 
capital  in  a  country  in  which  such  capital  was  needed  for  the 
development  of  the  land  and  the  encouragement  of  manu- 
factures. It  would  mean  the  extension  of  credit  and  would 
facilitate  the  payment  of  taxes  by  increasing  the  currency,  for 
its  bills  and  notes  would  circulate  as  cash.  It  would  stimulate 
business.  It  would  act  as  a  kind  of  central  exchange  office  for 
investment  opportunities,  keeping  in  constant  circulation  capi- 
tal which  private  individuals  would  be  likely  to  hold  in  their 
strong-boxes  for  lack  of  a  timely  offer  of  investment  or  of  a 
thorough  confidence  in  the  stability  of  the  currency.  It  would 
furnish  the  government  with  a  convenient  fiscal  agent  for  the 
negotiation  of  loans,  the  payment  of  the  interest  on  the  public 
debt,  and  the  deposit  of  the  Treasury  balances.  Hamilton  pro- 
posed that  the  Bank  should  be  incorporated  by  Congress  for  a 
period  of  twenty  years  with  a  capital  of  $10,000,000.  Its  shares 
of  $400  each  should  be  offered  for  public  subscription,  one 
fourth  being  paid  for  in  specie  (gold  or  silver)  and  three  fourths 

1  Subsidiary  measures  of  the  Hamiltonian  system  were  the  creation  of  a  sink- 
ing fund  and  the  establishment  of  a  mint.  Hamilton  wanted  to  have  the  Presi- 
dent's head  stamped  on  the  coins  of  the  United  States ;  but  the  House  thought 
that  this  smacked  too  much  of  royalty,  and  substituted  the  figure  of  Liberty. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS 


159 


in  the  stock  of  the  public  debt  bearing  interest  at  6  per  cent.  Its 
bills  and  notes  were  to  be  receivable  for  all  dues  to  the  United 
States.  The  government  might  subscribe  for  one  fifth  of  the 
stock  ($2,000,000)  and  borrow  the  money  back  from  the  Bank 
forthwith.  The  Bank  was  to  have  a  monopoly  in  transacting 
the  government's  financial  business,  but  was  forbidden  to  buy 
any  of  the  public  debt  in  the  market;  that  is,  to  speculate 
in  government  securities.  The  Treasury  Department  was  to 
have  the  right  to  inspect  the  Bank's  accounts  and  to  demand 
reports  as  often  as  once  a  week  on  the  amount  of  its  stock  out- 
standing, its  debts,  deposits,  notes  in  circulation,  and  cash 
in  hand. 

The  Bank  bill  was  passed  in  February,  1791,  and  sent  to  the 
President  for  his  signature.  Washington,  as  was  his  custom  in 
weighty  matters,  asked  for  written  opinions  on  the  bill  from 
the  members  of  his  cabinet.  Both  Randolph  and  Jefferson 
advised  the  President  to  veto  it.  The  Attorney-General  raised 
the  objection  that  the  Constitution  did  not  give  Congress  the 
power  to  create  corporations;  and  Jefferson,  with  his  innate 
jealousy  of  the  extension  of  the  authority  of  the  central  govern- 
ment, argued  further  that  the  Bank  was  neither  "necessary" 
nor  "proper"  for  carrying  out  the  powers  granted  to  Congress. 
Once  depart  from  the  strict  letter  of  the  Constitution,  and  a 
clear  road  to  despotism  would  be  opened.  Washington  sent  the 
opinions  of  Randolph  and  Jefferson  to  Hamilton  in  confidence, 
with  the  request  for  a  speedy  reply.  In  an  elaborate  argument, 
submitted  to  the  President  on  February  23,  1791,  Hamilton 
answered  the  objections  of  his  colleagues  in  the  cabinet,  insist- 
ing on  the  sovereignty  of  the  national  government  and  showing 
how  the  BankjKQuld  be  both  a  necessary  and  a  proper  agency 
in  such  important  federal  duties  as  the  laying  and  collecting  of 
taxes,  the  borrowing  of  money,  the  regulation  of  currency  and 
trade,  and  the  national  defense.  His  arguments  prevailed,  and 
Washington  signed  the  bill.  Hamilton's  opinion  on  the  Bank 
was  a  momentous  document,  for  it  was  the  first  exposition  of 
the  "implied  powers"  of  Congress,  deducible  from  the  general 
tenor  and  purport  of  the  Constitution, — the  first  tentative 


160  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

stretching  of  the  "elastic  clause"  (Art.  I,  sect.  8,  par.  18)  which 
has  been  kept  pretty  taut  ever  since.1 

Historians  have  been  quite  unanimous  in  attributing  to 
Hamilton's  financial  measures  the  establishment  of  the  public 
credit  of  the  United  States.  Daniel  Webster's  tribute  to  the 
first  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  has  become  classic:  "He  smote 
the  rock  of  national  resources  and  abundant  streams  of  revenue 
gushed  forth ;  he  touched  the  dead  corpse  of  publio  credit  and 
it  sprang  upon  its  feet."  Certain  it  is  that  the  growth  of  our 
economic  prosperity  was  rapid  in  the  years  following  the 
adoption  of  the  Hamiltonian  system.  Our  exports  increased  to 
$20,000,000  a  year.  Our  shipping  extended  literally  around 
the  world.2  The  total  Bank  stock  was  taken  up  within  two 
hours  after  the  subscription  books  were  opened,  and  in  a  few 
months  it  was  selling  at  a  premium  of  40  per  cent.  Foreign 
capital  sought  investment  in  America,  while  the  European  wars 
kindled  by  the  French  Revolution  stimulated  our  manufactures 
and  commerce.3  At  the  same  time,  there  is  evidence  enough 
that  our  general  economic  fortunes  were  on  the  rise  before 
Hamilton's  measures  went  into  effect.  European  exports  to 
the  United  States  increased  from  $9,400,000  in  1788  to  $12, 
600,000  in  1789  and  $17,100,000  in  1790.  Hamilton  himself 

*In  1819  the  famous  case  of  McCulloch  vs.  Maryland  tested  the  constitution- 
ality of  the  Bank  before  the  Supreme  Court.  Chief  Justice  Marshall's  decision 
completely  upheld  the  legislation  of  1791.  It  is  interesting  to  see  how  closely 
the  reasoning  of  Marshall  (United  States  Reports,  4  Wheat.  3i6ff.)  follows 
Hamilton's  cabinet  opinion  (Works  (Federal  edition),  Vol.  Ill,  pp.  445-493). 
Though  the  first  Bank  failed  of  recharter  by  a  single  vote  in  both  Houses  of 
Congress  in  1811,  and  the  second  Bank  was  overthrown  by  the  election  of  1832, 
the  most  important  features  of  Hamilton's  scheme — a  banking-system  under  the 
supervision  of  the  government,  and  a  national  currency — were  revived  in  the 
stress  of  the  Civil  War  and  have  remained  a  part  of  our  policy  ever  since. 

2  On  August  10,  1790,  Captain  Gray,  in  the  ship  Columbia,  arrived  in  Boston 
Harbor  with  a  cargo  of  tea  from  China,  after  carrying  the  American  flag  for  the 
first  time  around  the  world.    On  his  next  voyage,  to  repeat  the  exploit,  Gray 
discovered  the  great  river  on  our  western  coast  and  named  it  after  his  ship 
(1792).   This  discovery  constituted  one   of   our  strongest  claims  to   the  vast 
Oregon  region  in  later  years. 

3  European  investors  held  17,000  of  the  25,000  shares  of  the  stock  when  the 
Bank  was  disestablished  in  1811. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  161 

spoke,  in  his  Report  on  Manufactures,  of  the  "many  factories 
of  leather,  iron,  copper,  flax,  fur,  wool,  brick,  soap,  carriages, 
etc."  as  " having  attained  to  a  considerable  degree  of  maturity." 
Washington  believed  that  we  were  on  the  up-grade  in  1788. 
He  wrote  to  Jefferson  in  Paris,  on  August  3 1  of  that  year,  that 
the  American  people  were  "  emerging  from  the  gulf  of  dissipa- 
tion and  debt  into  which  they  had  precipitated  themselves  at 
the  close  of  the  war,"  and  that  "  economy  and  industry  were 
evidently  gaining  ground."  To  Lafayette  he  had  written  a 
few  weeks  earlier,  "I  really  believe  that  there  never  was  so 
much  labor  and  economy  to  be  found  in  the  country  as  at  the 
present  moment" ;  and  he  predicted  that  when  the  new  govern- 
ment should  go  into  effect  many  blessings  would  be  attributed  to 
it  which  were  already  "taking  their  rise  from  industry  and 
frugality."  Hamilton  was  able  to  take  advantage  of  this  turn 
in  the  tide  of  prosperity.1 

But  whether  Hamilton's  measures  inaugurated  our  prosper- 
ity or  only  hastened  its  march,  they  divided  the  country  at  large, 
as  they  did  the  cabinet,  into  two  irreconcilable  parties  and  fur- 
nished the  program  for  a  concerted  opposition  to  the  admin- 
istration of  Washington.  Not  that  they  created  either  the 
economic  conditions  or  the  social  disposition  out  of  which  the 
parties  came.  Otto,  the  secretary  of  the  French  legation  at 
New  York,  wrote  home  to  Vergennes  in  October,  1786,  "Al- 
though there  are  no  nobles  in  America,  there  is  a  class  of  men, 
denominated  gentlemen,  who  by  reason  of  their  wealth,  their 
talents,  and  their  education,  their  families  or  the  offices  which 
they  hold,  aspire  to  a  preeminence  which  the  common  people 

^'The  Constitution  was  floated  on  a  wave  of  commercial  prosperity"  (Far- 
rand,  "The  Development  of  the  United  States,"  p.  75).  G.  S.  Callender  remarks 
in  his  "Economic  History  of  the  United  States"  (p.  182),  "One  may  well 
wonder  what  would  have  been  the  fate  of  Hamilton's  brilliant  projects  ...  if 
they  had  been  tried  on  the  country  during  the  economic  gloom  of  1785-1786." 
A  curious  testimony  to  reviving  prosperity  is  found  in  a  squib  in  the  Pennsyl- 
vania Packet  of  July  4,  1788,  reporting  the  ratification  of  the  Constitution: 
"  Ship  news  extra  !  Arrived  safely  in  port  the  Ship  Federal  Constitution,  Per- 
petual Union  commander.  In  her  came  passengers  Flourishing  Commerce,  Pub- 
lic Faith,  Confidence,  Justice." 


1 62  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

refuses  to  grant  them  .  .  .  and  moreover,  they  are  creditors, 
and  therefore  interested  in  strengthening  the  government  and 
watching  over  the  execution  of  the  laws."  Hamilton  himself,  in 
the  speech  in  which  he  recommended  to  the  convention  at 
Philadelphia  his  plan  for  an  " aristocratic"  constitution,  said: 
"All  communities  divide  themselves  into  the  few  and  the  many. 
The  few  are  the  rich  and  well  born,  the  other,  the  mass  of  the 
populace.  .  .  .  The  people  are  turbulent  and  changing;  they 
seldom  judge  or  determine  right.  Give,  therefore,  to  the  first 
class  a  distinct,  permanent  share  in  the  government.  They 
will  check  the  boisterousness  of  the  second."  It  was  this  " first 
class" — the  solid  men  of  wealth,  birth,  and  position,  the  large 
merchants,  manufacturers,  and  capitalists,  the  holders  of  the 
public  securities,  the  clergy  and  the  lawyers,  the  advocates  of 
energy  and  full  competency  in  the  national  government — who 
rallied  to  the  support  of  Hamilton's  program.  They  were 
called  Federalists.  They  were  a  small  minority  of  the  total 
population,  but  common  interests  bound  them  into  a  com- 
pact, alert  body.  They  had  the  offices  of  the  government  in 
their  hands. 

On  the  other  side  were  the  mass  of  the  people — the  debt- 
burdened  farmers  of  the  interior  counties;  the  manufacturers 
and  apprentices,  spinning,  carding,  and  weaving  their  wool, 
hammering  out  their  iron  nails,  bending  over  their  lapstones 
to  shape  the  rude  leather  soles;  the  hardy  pioneers  who  ever 
since  the  war  had  been  crossing  the  mountains  into  the  rich 
valleys  of  the  Ohio,  the  Cumberland,  and  the  Tennessee.  These 
people  had  little  need  for  a  strong  central  government.  They 
had  fought  for  their  liberty  and  wished  now  to  enjoy  it.  They 
had  no  capital  to  worry  about  and  were  little  concerned  with 
the  credit  of  the  United  States.  They  had  no  money  to  spare 
and  looked  with  distrust  on  the  grant  of  unlimited  powers  of 
taxation  to  Congress.  The  opposition  to  the  Constitution  in 
1787-1788,  as  an  aristocratic  document  "  squinting  towards 
monarchy,"  had  come  chiefly  from  the  agricultural  debtor  class. 
They  were  called  Anti-Federalists  then,  while  the  men  who 
supported  the  Constitution  were  called  Federalists.  The  new 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  163 

Federalists  of  1791,  Hamilton's  party,  were  essentially  the  same 
people  as  the  Federalists  of  1787,  since  thewery  considerations 
which  urged  men  to  change  the  ineffective  Articles  of  Confeder- 
ation for  a  vigorous  Constitution — namely,  the  security  of  the 
national  debt,  the  regulation  of  commerce,  a  dependable  cur- 
rency, and  an  adequate  national  revenue  assessed  and  collected 
by  national  authority — led  them  also  to  support  the  vigorous 
measures  of  Alexander  Hamilton  which  were  aimed  at  securing 
those  desirable  ends.1 

The  opponents  of  the  Hamiltonian  system  took  the  name 
of  Democratic-Republicans,2  as  a  protest  against  the  aristo- 
cratic conception  of  a  republic  governed  by  "the  rich,  the  well- 
born, and  the  able."  They  maintained  in  their  debates  in 
Congress  and  in  their  newspapers  and  pamphlets  that  the  great 
augmentation  of  the  public  debt,  resting  as  it  must  on  a  basis 
of  increased  taxation,  meant  the  ruin  of  agriculture  and  an 
intolerable  burden  to  the  debtor  class.  For  the  labor  of  the 
farmer  and  the  mechanic  must  eventually  pay  all  these  public 
charges.  "Every  atom  of  funded  debt,"  said  Mercer  of  Mary- 
land in  a  debate  in  the  House  in  1792,  "is  so  much  taken  from 
the  value  of  the  land  .  .  .  and  so  much  diminished  from  the 
value  of  labor.  .  .  .  The  effect  of  stocks3  is  to  transfer  the 
fruits  and  labor  of  the  many  .  .  .  into  the  hands  of  the  opu- 
lent few,  who  exchange  them  for  foreign  luxuries  and  con- 
sume in  an  hour  the  labor  of  industrious  families  for  years. 
It  prevents  a  general  diffusion  of  wealth  by  drawing  it  to  a 

1  Professor  Charles  A.  Beard  has  demonstrated  in  his  "Economic  Origins  of 
Jeffersonian   Democracy"  the  substantial  identity   of  the  Federalists   of   1787 
with  the  Federalists  of  1791.   The  men  who  made  the  Constitution  had  a  very 
large  share  in  putting  it  into  effect,  26  out  of  the  39  signers  being  among  the 
personnel  of  the  first  administration  as  members  of  Congress,  judges,  customs 
officials,  etc.   The  few  conspicuous  men,  like  Madison  and  Patrick  Henry,  who 
changed  from  old  Federalists  into  new  Republicans  or  from  old  Anti-Federalists 
into  new  Federalists,  were  only  the  exceptions  that  prove  the  rule. 

2  The  name  was  abbreviated  into  Democrats  or  Republicans,  the  latter  used 
almost  exclusively  by  the  members  of  the  party  itself,  and  the  former  by  their 
adversaries,  often  with  the  adjectives  "vile,"  "wild,"  or  "Jacobinical"  prefixed. 

3  Meaning  the  6  per  cent  bonds  of  the  government  issued  in  1790  to  take 
up  the  old  certificates  of  debt,  and  the  $10,000,000  of  Bank  stock  issued  in  1791. 


1 64  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

center,  and  saps  the  foundations  of  Republican  Government." 
Furthermore,  the  Republicans  maintained  that  the  Hamiltonian 
measures  were  sectional,  favoring  the  mercantile-manufacturing 
interests  of  the  North  against  the  agricultural  interests  of  the 
South.  How  well  founded  this  charge  was  can  be  judged  from 
the  fact  that  only  three  votes  in  favor  of  the  Bank  bill  came 
from  the  district  south  of  the  Potomac  and  only  one  vote  against 
it  from  the  region  north  of  the  Potomac.  A  correspondent  wrote 
to  Hamilton  in  1792  from  Virginia,  "There  is  no  considerable 
mercantile  circulating  capital  and  there  are  but  few  moneyed 
men  in  the  country  [the  state  of  Virginia]".  Georgia  and 
the  Carolinas  (except  for  the  city  of  Charleston)  held  very 
little  of  the  public  debt.  It  had  been  bought  up  by  specu- 
lators from  the  great  commercial  centers  of  the  North.  Of 
manufactures  there  were  practically  none  south  of  the  Potomac 
in  1790.  Funding,  assumption,  the  Bank,  the  tariff,  were  all 
measures  calculated  to  benefit  that  half  of  our  country  which 
lies  north  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line. 

The  issue  between  Federalists  and  Republicans  was  far  more 
serious  than  a  mere  question  of  political  policy  or  economic 
expediency,  such  as  the  curtailment  of  states'  rights  or  the  im- 
position of  a  high  tariff.  It  was,  in  the  honest  opinion  of  the 
protagonists  on  both  sides,  a  question  of  the  very  existence  of 
the  government  itself.  Hence  the  violence  of  party  strife,  the 
vituperative  language  on  the  floor  of  Congress,  the  vehement 
quarrels  in  the  cabinet,  the  venom  of  the  press.  To  the  Feder- 
alists all  the  fine  rhetoric  about  freedom,  in  prose  and  verse, 
with  which  Philip  Freneau  filled  the  columns  of  the  National 
Gazette — when  he  had  space  to  spare  after  vilifying  the  "  mo- 
narchical" administration  from  Washington  down — was  only  a 
flimsy  pretext  to  hide  the  real  motives  of  the  Republicans. 
They  objected  to  the  laws  that  were  passed,  said  the  Federalists, 
because  they  did  not  want  to  obey  any  laws  at  all ;  they  opposed 
the  assumption  of  the  debts  because  they  did  not  want  to 
pay  their  debts.  Their  vaunted  " liberty"  had  already  led  to 
anarchy,  and  anarchy  to  national  bankruptcy  and  impotence. 
Their  "democracy"  meant  the  rule  of  the  mob — the  "people" 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  165 

whom  Hamilton  in  a  fit  of  impatient  disgust  called  "a  great 
beast/'  and  who  John  Adams  declared  were  "the  worst  con- 
ceivable keepers  of  their  own  liberty,"  since  they  could  "neither 
judge,  nor  think,  nor  will  as  a  political  body."  "There  never 
was  a  democracy,"  he  continued,  "that  did  not  commit  suicide." 
If  our  new  republic  was  destined  to  survive,  he  thought,  it  would 
be  because  security,  energy,  and  good  faith  marked  its  adminis- 
tration in  the  hands  of  the  competent  and  responsible  few,  and 
not  because  we  were  all  "leveled  to  an  equality  with  French 
barbers." 

The  Republicans  were  equally  convinced  that  the  preservation 
of  the  new  American  state  depended  on  the  maintenance  of 
their  theory  of  democratic  government.  We  were  "galloping 
into  monarchy,"  said  Jefferson.  To  what  end  the  sacrifices  of 
1775-1781  if  another  England  were  to  be  established  on  these 
shores,  with  its  executive  officers  distributing  the  patronage  and 
marshaling  the  factions  in  the  legislature,  with  its  Bank  and 
its  huge  funded  debt,  with  its  aristocracy  of  finance  and  com- 
merce in  league  with  the  beneficent  administration — with  every- 
thing, in  short,  but  the  actual  titles  of  nobility!  Was  the 
American  Revolution  the  vindication  of  the  natural  and  inde- 
feasible rights  of  man,  as  its  great  charter  proclaimed,  or  was 
it  only  the  vindication  of  the  usurped  and  partial  rights  of  "the 
rich,  the  well-born,  and  the  able"?  Jefferson  confessed  that  he 
was  not  of  those  "who  fear  the  rule  of  the  people."  He  was  not 
dismayed  at  the  thought  of  occasional  revolutions :  they  cleared 
the  political  atmosphere.  He  insisted  on  absolute  freedom  of 
speech  and  press.  Better  newspapers  without  a  government 
than  a  government  without  newspapers,  he  said.  Even  the 
venerated  name  of  Washington  failed  to  weigh  against  this  con- 
viction of  the  sacredness  of  democracy.  The  President's  sense 
of  propriety  was  shocked  and  his  temper  sorely  tried  by  the 
attacks  made  on  him  and  his  administration  in  Freneau's 
Gazette.  He  let  Jefferson,  who  was  Freneau's  patron,  know  of 
his  chagrin,  but  the  Secretary  of  State  refused  to  dismiss 
Freneau  from  his  modest  position  in  the  department  or  to  in- 
tercede with  him  privately  for  the  suppression  of  his  diatribes. 


1 66  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Valuing  the  personal  friendship  and  the  political  services  of 
both  Jefferson  and  Hamilton,  the  President  bore  their  quarrels 
in  the  cabinet  with  extraordinary  patience  and  tried  his  best 
to  reconcile  their  views.  He  wrote  them  each  a  personal  letter 
in  the  summer  of  1792,  expressing  his  appreciation  of  their 
services  and  begging  them  to  work  together  in  harmony.  The 
reply  of  each  of  the  Secretaries  showed  deference  to  their  chief, 
but  no  sign  of  sympathy  for  each  other.  Both  were  ready  to 
resign  from  the  cabinet,  but  neither  was  willing  to  modify  his 
policy.  Each  threw  the  blame  on  the  other.  Every  month 
strengthened  the  opposition  to  the  Hamiltonian  system.  Spec- 
ulation forced  the  Bank  shares  to  inflated  levels  and  precipitated 
a  financial  panic  in  1792.  The  excise  law,  exceedingly  unpopular 
in  the  back  counties  of  Pennsylvania,  Virginia,  and  the  Caro- 
linas,  where  the  moonshine  stills  furnished  the  farmers  the  most 
convenient  currency  in  the  form  of  whisky,  was  already  pro- 
voking the  resistance  which  culminated  in  the  famous  Whisky 
Rebellion  of  1794.*  And,  finally,  Jefferson  was  busy  in  season 
and  out  of  season  with  tireless  pen  and  inexhaustible  resources 
of  appeal  and  encouragement  in  organizing  the  inarticulate 
democracy  of  the  common  people  into  a  party  which  should  be 
able  to  contend  with  the  compact  group  led  by  Hamilton  and 
his  " corrupt  squadron"2  in  Congress. 

The  first  real  trial  of  strength  between  the  parties  came  in  the 
election  of  1792,  when  the  Hamiltonian  system  went  before 
the  country  for  indorsement.  It  was  an  anxious  moment  for  the 
Federalists.  Besides  the  financial  panic  and  the  resistance  to  the 

aSee  page  186. 

2  This  was  the  name  by  which  Jefferson  stigmatized  the  members  of  Congress 
who  held  the  public  securities  or  "funds"  of  the  United  States.  These  men 
were  doubly  "corrupt"  in  Jefferson's  view,  first  because  they  had  "niched"  the 
certificates  of  debt  from  the  poor,  and,  second,  because  they  voted  in  a  body  for 
the  Hamiltonian  policies  which  protected  their  financial  interests.  Hamilton,  in 
a  long  letter  to  Washington  in  1792,  sought  to  disprove  the  charge  of  collusion 
between  the  Treasury  and  the  members  of  Congress  ;  but  Professor  Beard  has 
furnished  the  figures  to  justify  Jefferson's  assertion  that  had  those  actually  in- 
terested in  the  outcome  of  the  funding  process  refrained  from  voting  on  Hamil- 
ton's proposals  not  a  single  one  of  them  would  have  been  carried  ("Economic 
Origins  of  Jeffersonian  Democracy,"  p.  194) . 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  167 

excise  tax  referred  to  in  the  last  paragraph  the  administration 
was  suffering  under  the  disgrace  of  the  murderous  defeat  of  Gen- 
eral Arthur  St.  Clair's  army  of  1500  men  by  the  Indians  of  the 
Northwest  Territory  (November  4,  1791).  Jefferson  counted 
on  the  farmers  of  the  South,  the  malcontents  of  Pennsylvania, 
and  the  anti-Hamiltonians  in  New  York,  skillfully  led  by 
Clinton  and  Burr,  to  turn  the  tide  of  Federalism.  Unless  they 
should  be  buttressed  by  the  strength  of  Washington's  great 
name,  the  Federalists  saw  defeat  looming.  The  "supercilious 
superiority"  of  John  Adams,  who  would  be  the  logical  candidate 
of  the  party  if  Washington  persevered  in  his  intention  to  retire 
to  his  estate  at  Mount  Vernon,  would  oppose  too  feeble  a  dike 
to  the  rising  tide  of  Republicanism.  Hamilton,  by  dint  of  much 
argument,  prevailed  upon  the  President  to  serve  another  term, 
and  Jefferson,  with  equal  sincerity  but  less  anxiety,  joined  in 
the  general  prayer.  Washington  again  received  the  vote  of 
every  elector,  but  the  second  honor  on  the  ballot,  instead  of 
being  distributed  among  eleven  names  as  it  had  been  in  the 
election  of  1 789,  was  contested  between  the  Federalist  and  the 
Republican  candidate,  with  none  too  large  a  margin  in  favor  of 
the  former.1  The  Republicans  elected  a  majority  to  the  new 
House  of  Representatives. 

FOREIGN  ENTANGLEMENTS 

According  to  Washington's  own  confession,  it  was  not  solici- 
tude for  the  Federalist  party  that  persuaded  him  in  1792  to 
postpone  his  anticipated  retirement  to  Mount  Vernon,  but  the 
"perplexed  and  critical  posture  of  our  affairs  with  foreign 
nations."  It  is  difficult  for  us  today,  with  our  secure  and  well- 
defined  borders,  with  our  closely  welded  and  tested  Union, 
with  our  long  and  popular  tradition  (but  lately  disturbed)  of 
indifference  to  the  quarrels  of  the  Old  World,  to  realize  how 

1  Adams  carried  New  England,  Pennsylvania,  New  Jersey,  Delaware,  Mary- 
land, and  South  Carolina  (77  votes).  Clinton  carried  New  York,  Virginia, 
North  Carolina,  and  Georgia  (50  votes).  The  new  state  of  Kentucky  (1792) 
gave  its  four  votes  to  Jefferson. 


1 68  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

dangerously  exposed  we  were  in  the  earliest  years  of  the  repub- 
lic to  the  storms  of  European  politics.  The  Revolution,  al- 
though it  secured  our  political  independence,  did  not  make  us 
economically  independent  of  Europe.  After  the  war,  as  before 
it,  our  prosperity  depended  on  our  foreign  commerce.  Manu- 
factures were  in  their  infancy.  Laborers  were  scarce  and  land 
was  abundant.  Our  enormous  surplus  of  foodstuffs,  forest  prod- 
ucts, fish,  salt,  and  tobacco  had  to  be  exchanged  abroad  for 
the  luxuries,  and  even  for  some  of  the  bare  necessities,  of 
civilized  life.  We  were  vitally  concerned,  therefore,  in  the 
commercial  policy  of  the  European  maritime  and  colonial 
powers — France,  Spain,  Holland,  and  Great  Britain.  Further- 
more, the  land  between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  Mississippi  was 
a  vast  " arena  of  friction."  Indian  tribes  and  confederacies 
still  harassed  our  settlements  as  they  spread  northward  from 
the  Ohio  and  southward  from  the  Cumberland,  while  the  agents 
of  England  and  Spain,  our  neighbors  on  the  north  and  south, 
were  busy  with  a  disavowed  but  rather  obvious  propaganda  to 
encourage  the  Indians  in  their  resistance  to  the  establishment 
of  our  authority  in  the  lands  which  had  been  ceded  to  us  by  the 
Treaty  of  Paris.  England  even  retained  garrisons  in  half  a 
dozen  fur  posts  strung  along  the  lakes  from  Dutchman's  Point 
on  Lake  Champlain  to  Mackinaw  on  Lake  Michigan — all  in 
the  territory  of  the  United  States  (see  map,  p.  101). 

Our  diplomatic  relations  also  were  highly  unsatisfactory.  With 
Spain,  who  had  been  the  ally  of  our  ally  France  in  the  Revolu- 
tion, we  had  made  no  treaty  at  all  in  1783,  nor  were  we  able 
to  conclude  one  in  the  critical  years  that  followed ;  although 
Spanish  control  of  the  Mississippi  and  Spanish  possession  of 
Florida  (lying  all  along  our  southern  border)  made  an  agree- 
ment concerning  the  navigation  of  the  river  and  the  policing  of 
the  hostile  tribes  of  Creeks  and  Cherokees  an  imperative  neces- 
sity. With  France  we  had  a  treaty,  the  earliest  in  our  national 
history,  dating  from  the  dark  days  of  the  American  Revolution 
(1778).  But  as  this  treaty  was  in  the  form  of  an  alliance, 
pledging  us  under  certain  conditions  to  fight  by  the  side  of 
France  for  the  protection  of  her  American  (West  Indian) 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  169 

possessions,  and  giving  her  the  privilege  of  using  our  ports  for 
her  prizes  of  war,  it  proved  eventually  to  be  more  of  an  em- 
barrassment to  us  than  the  lack  of  a  treaty  with  Spain.  As  to 
England,  there  was,  of  course,  the  famous  treaty  of  1783.  But 
instead  of  settling  old  disputes,  this  treaty  only  opened  new 
ones.  Every  article  in  it,  except  the  first,  which  recognized  the 
independence  of  the  United  States,  led  to  contention  and  mutual 
charges  of  bad  faith. 

To  deal  with  the  delicate  diplomatic  situation  we  should 
have  had  a  well-organized  department  of  foreign  affairs,  with 
the  tradition  of  a  firm  and  consistent  policy,  backed  by  the 
strength  of  the  united  nation.  Instead  of  that,  when  Jefferson 
assumed  the  office  of  Secretary  of  State,  in  the  spring  of  1 790, 
he  inherited  a  legacy  of  mistrust  and  contempt  bequeathed  by 
the  weak  government  of  the  critical  period.  It  was  certain, 
under  these  conditions,  that  the  first  serious  strife  among  the 
maritime  nations  of  Europe  would  be  the  signal  for  trouble  in 
America.  And,  indeed,  it  looked  as  if  that  trouble  were  at 
hand  in  the  very  first  year  of  Washington's  government,  when 
Great  Britain  threatened  to  go  to  war  with  Spain  over  the 
seizure  of  British  ships  attempting  to  establish  a  trading-post 
on  the  western  coast  of  America  at  Nootka  Sound.  In  case  of 
war  the  British  would  probably  march  across  our  territory 
from  Canada  to  attack  the  Spaniards  on  the  Mississippi.  They 
would  kindle  war  in  Florida  and  Louisiana  and  rouse  the  Indian 
tribes  on  our  borders.  Fortunately,  the  war  cloud  blew  over 
and  our  country  was  left  in  an  apprehensive  state  of  peace 
during  Washington's  first  administration,  to  establish  the  federal 
government  and  put  into  operation  the  Hamiltonian  fiscal 
system,  which  we  have  studied  in  the  preceding  section. 

Hardly  was  Washington  seated  in  office  for  a  second  time, 
however,  when  the  storm  burst.  In  the  first  days  of  April,  1 793, 
a  British  packet  sailed  into  New  York  bearing  ominous  news. 
The  French  Republic,  whose  baptismal  victory  over  the  Prus- 
sians at  Valmy  the  Americans  had  celebrated  with  civic  feasts 
and  processions,  with  bell-ringings  and  banquets,  only  a  few 
weeks  before,  had  fallen  into  the  hands  of  the  radicals,  who  had 


170  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

guillotined  their  king,  hurled  defiance  against  all  the  thrones 
of  Europe,  and  added  England,  Holland,  and  Sardinia  to  the 
list  of  their  enemies  in  arms.  A  few  days  after  the  arrival  of 
this  news  Citizen  Edmond  Genet,  the  minister  from  the  French 
Republic  to  the  United  States,  landed  in  Charleston  "with  the 
smell  of  blood  on  his  ambassadorial  garments."  Genet  was 
enthusiastic,  vain,  rash,  and  emotional.  He  came  not  as  a 
diplomat  but  as  the  agent  of  the  French  Republic.  Even  before 
his  credentials  were  presented  at  Philadelphia  he  began  to 
violate  the  principles  of  international  courtesy  and  law,  equip- 
ping vessels  in  our  ports  to  fight  the  British,  enlisting  our 
seamen,  establishing  courts  for  the  condemnation  of  prizes, 
ordering  French  consuls  to  carry  out  his  belligerent  plans,  de- 
manding an  advance  payment  of  the  interest  on  the  French 
loan  for  the  purchase  of  war  supplies. 

As  Genet  was  making  a  triumphal  progress  up  to  Phila- 
delphia, feted  by  the  Francophile  Republicans  of  the  Southern 
states,  the  President  summoned  his  cabinet  for  advice  as  to  how 
to  treat  the  new  envoy.  Should  he  be  officially  received  and  the 
Republic  which  sent  him  recognized?  If  so,  what  would  be 
the  effect  on  our  relations  with  those  maritime  countries  with 
which  the  French  Republic  was  at  war  and  with  which  our  trade 
was  flourishing  ?  There  was  the  embarrassing  treaty  of  alliance 
of  1778  with  France,  pledging  us  to  fight  her  battles  and  open- 
ing our  ports  to  her  prizes.  Was  there  occasion  now  for  France 
to  demand  fulfillment  of  the  pledge  and  so  involve  us  in  a 
war  with  Great  Britain  ?  The  cabinet  agreed  unanimously  that 
Genet  should  be  received,  but  that,  at  the  same  time,  a  proc- 
lamation should  be  issued  forbidding  our  citizens  "to  take  part 
in  any  hostilities  on  land  or  sea  with  any  of  the  belligerent 
powers"  or  to  carry  contraband  goods  to  their  ports.  Washing- 
ton published  the  proclamation  on  the  very  day  that  Genet 
entered  the  capital  (April  22,  1793). 

If  the  Proclamation  of  Neutrality  gave  umbrage  to  the  friends 
of  France,  their  objections  were  speedily  overcome  by  the  folly 
of  Genet  himself.  In  defiance  of  the  warnings  of  Governor 
Mifflin  of  Pennsylvania,  and  in  spite  of  his  own  promise  to 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  171 

Secretary  Jefferson,  he  allowed  the  prize  brig  Le  Petit  Demo- 
crate,  armed  and  manned  at  Philadelphia,  to  sail  out  of  the 
Delaware  River  to  cooperate  with  a  force  raised  in  our  Western 
territory  for  an  attack  on  Spanish  New  Orleans.  He  used  the 
columns  of  the  Republican  press  to  inveigh  against  the  govern- 
ment's " cowardly  abandonment"  of  its  friends,  threatened  to 
appeal  to  the  nation  over  the  head  of  President  Washington, 
scolded  the  cabinet,  and  finally  declared  that  the  French  "were 
punished  for  having  believed  that  the  American  nation  had  a 
flag,  that  it  had  some  respect  for  its  laws  [treaties],  some  con- 
viction of  its  force,  and  some  sentiment  of  its  dignity."  This 
was  more  than  even  the  stanchest  friends  of  France  could  en- 
dure. Jefferson  joined  with  Hamilton  in  asking  for  the  recall  „ 
of  the  obnoxious  envoy.1 

On  June  5,  1794,  Congress  supplemented  Washington's  proc- 
lamation by  passing  ^jie^trality  _act,  which  has  been  the  basis 
of  our  policy  toward  belligerents  ever  since.  It  was  framed  on 
the  twin  principles  developed  by  the  learned  Jefferson  in  his 
negotiations  with  Genet;  namely,  "the  right  of  every  nation  to 
prohibit  acts  of  sovereignty  from  being  exercised  by  any  other 
nation  within  its  limits"  and  "the  duty  of  every  neutral  nation 
to  prohibit  such  acts  as  would  injure  one  of  the  warring  powers." 

The  ablest  exposition  and  defense  of  the  Proclamation  of  Neu- 
trality was  made  by  Alexander  Hamilton  in  a  series  of  seven 
papers  published  in  the  Gazette  of  the  United  States  over  the 
signature  "Pacificus."  In  them  he  answered  the  objections  of 
the  Republicans  ( i )  that  the  President  had  exceeded  his  powers 

1  Genet  never  returned  to  France.  During  his  mission  to  the  United  States 
the  party  of  the  Girondists,  to  which  he  belonged,  was  overthrown  by  the 
Jacobins,  and  Robespierre  was  waiting  to  send  Genet  to  the  guillotine.  Our 
government  magnanimously  refused  to  give  him  up.  He  married  a  daughter 
of  Governor  Clinton  and  lived  in  New  York  to  a  ripe  old  age.  In  1870  the  poet 
William  Cullen  Bryant  described  him  as  he  had  seen  him  more  than  forty  years 
before:  "A  tall  man  with  a  reddish  wig  and  a  full  round  voice,  speaking 
English  in  a  sort  of  oratorical  manner,  like  a  man  making  a  speech,  but  very 
well  for  a  Frenchman.  He  was  a  dreamer  in  some  respects,  and,  I  remember, 
had  a  plan  for  navigating  the  air  in  balloons  .  .  .  shaped  like  a  fish  and  pro- 
pelled by  sails  and  guided  by  a  rudder." 


172  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

in  taking  out  of  the  hands  of  Congress  the  question  of  deciding 
war,  (2)  that  we  were  repudiating  our  just  debt  of  gratitude  to 
France,  and  (3)  that  the  proclamation  was  a  "sop  to  England," 
since  we  had  not  issued  any  such  paper  when  France  went  to 
war  with  Prussia  and  Austria  nearly  a  year  before.  Hamilton 
had  little  difficulty  in  showing  the  difference  between  declaring 
war  (which  lay  in  the  power  of  Congress)  and  denning  our 
status  of  peace  (which  was  the  province  of  the  executive),  or  in 
proving  that  the  entrance  of  maritime  nations  like  England  and 
Holland  into  the  war  had  a  significance  for  the  United  States 
far  different  from  that  of  the  purely  continental  conflict  between 
France  and  the  Germanic  powers.  As  to  our  debt  of  gratitude, 
it  was  to  the  government  of  Louis  XVI  that  we  owed  it,  not 
to  the  violent  and  unstable  faction  that  had  overthrown  his 
dynasty  and  shed  his  blood.  Finally,  the  treaty  of  1778  pledged 
us  to  aid  a  France  attacked  in  its  American  possessions,  not  a 
France  proclaiming  war  against  the  thrones  of  Europe.1 

The  immediate  result  of  the  war  between  France  and  Eng- 
land was  to  bring  our  strained  relations  with  the  latter  power 
almost  to  the  breaking-point.  For  nine  years  following  the 
peace  of  1783  we  had  been  trying  in  vain  to  secure  the  fair 
execution  of  the  treaty — the  evacuation  of  the  fur  posts  on  the 
Great  Lakes,  compensation  for  the  slaves  carried  off  on  British 
ships,  and  admission  to  privileges  of  trade  with  the  British 
colonies.  Great  Britain  did  not  deign  to  send  us  a  minister 
till  1791;  and  when  the  minister,  Mr.  Hammond,  came,  our 
Secretary  of  State  made  little  progress  with  him.  England's 
part,  Jefferson  claimed,  was  simple.  She  had  but  to  show  a  sign 
of  her  good  faith  by  evacuating  the  fur  posts.  The  United 
States  had  already  advised  the  states  to  compel  the  payment 
of  the  debts  which  their  citizens  owed  to  British  merchants; 

1  Hamilton's  argument  would  have  been  strengthened  by  citing  the  attitude 
of  the  French  revolutionary  government  itself  toward  treaties  concluded  under 
the  old  regime.  In  1789  the  National  Assembly  decided  that  it  would  not  abide 
by  the  "Family  Compact"  of  1761  with  Spain  and  help  that  nation  if  it  went 
to  war  with  England  over  the  Nootka  Sound  controversy.  In  1792  the  Legisla- 
tive Assembly  asserted  the  right  of  determining  which  of  the  prerevolutionary 
treaties  it  would  accept  or  reject. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  173 

but  as  this  required  "the  action  of  thirteen  independent  states 
scattered  over  a  continent,"  it  demanded  "time,  temper,  and 
tact  in  its  attainment."  Hammond  made  no  reply  to  Jefferson's 
able  and  temperate  note. 

Such  was  the  critical  state  of  our  relations  with  England 
when  the  European  war  broke  out.  The  French  Republic  im- 
mediately threw  open  its  West  Indian  ports  to  American  trade. 
Great  Britain,  invoking  the  Rule  of  1756,  which  forbade  a 
country  at  war  to  open  to  neutrals  ports  that  were  closed  to 
them  in  time  of  peace,  began  to  seize  our  ships  trading  with  the 
French  islands.  On  June  8,  1793,  a  British  order  declared  that 
"all  vessels  loaded  wholly  or  in  part  with  corn  [grain],  flour, 
or  meal,  bound  to  any  port  in  France,  should  be  stopped  and 
brought  into  convenient  harbors,  and  the  foodstuffs  on  board 
should  be  sold  perforce  to  his  Majesty's  government."  This 
was  followed  in  November  by  orders  to  seize  all  ships  carrying 
the  products  of  French  colonies  or  carrying  food  supplies  to 
the  ports  of  French  colonies.1 

In  the  early  months  of  1 794  it  looked  as  if  war  were  inevitable. 
The  measure  of  England's  offense  seemed  full.  The  news  came 
in  March  of  the  confiscation  orders  of  November,  and  with  it 
came  stories  of  the  seizure  of  our  ships,  the  condemnation  of  our 
cargoes,  and  the  impressment  of  our  sailors  into  the  British  serv- 
ice. Lord  Dorchester,  the  governor  of  Canada,  was  reported  to 
have  made  a  speech  to  the  Indians  of  our  Northwest  to  the  effect 
that  war  would  probably  break  out  between  England  and  the 
United  States  within  a  year.  A  sudden  treaty  of  peace  between 
Portugal  and  Algiers,  negotiated  by  the  British  consul  at  Lisbon 
in  1793,  had  led  to  the  withdrawal  of  the  Portuguese  fleet  from 
the  Mediterranean,  leaving  American  merchantmen  there  in  the 
lurch.  Before  we  could  get  frigates  built  to  protect  our  Medi- 
terranean commerce  the  Algerian  pirates  had  multiplied  their 

1Of  course,  it  was  not  to  encourage  American  trade  that  France  opened  her 
West  Indian  ports  to  us,  but  to  save  the  islands  from  starvation  when  England's 
mighty  sea  power  should  shut  off  their  commerce  with  Europe.  Still  it  was  a 
great  opening  for  our  ambitious  merchants,  and  soon  after  the  proclamation 
hundreds  of  American  ships  were  sailing  into  the  rich  harbors  of  Martinique, 
Antigua,  and  Santo  Domingo. 


174 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


captures  of  American  sailors  tenfold.  In  spite  of  Lord  Gren- 
ville's  assurance  of  good  will  it  was  impossible,  in  the  heated 
state  of  affairs,  for  Americans  to  believe  that  the  withdrawal  of 
the  Portuguese  fleet  was  "not  in  the  least  intended  to  injure"  us. 
A  temporary  embargo  was  laid  on  commerce  with  Great  Britain 
(March  26),  and  a  nonintercourse  bill  failed  to  pass  the  Senate 
only  by  the  casting  vote  of  Vice  President  Adams.  Bills  were 
put  through  Congress  to  fortify  our  harbors,  to  build  new 
frigates,  to  strengthen  our  artillery  service,  and  to  sanction  the 
call  of  80,000  militia  from  the  states.  Dayton  of  New  Jersey 
proposed  a  virtual  declaration  of  war  in  a  motion  to  sequester 
money  owed  by  our  merchants  to  creditors  in  England,  as  a 
compensation  for  the  seizure  of  our  vessels  by  British  cruisers. 
Men  were  beginning  to  drill  in  our  seaports.  "There  is  a 
panic,"  wrote  John  Adams,  "lest  peace  should  prevail." 

War  with  England  in  1794  would  have  been  a  national 
calamity.  We  were  just  recovering  from  the  ravages  of  the 
Revolution  and  the  critical  period  which  had  followed.  We  had 
no  navy  to  defend  our  commerce.  Our  borders  were  vexed  by 
constant  raids  of  hostile  Indians.  A  pioneer  wrote  to  Secre- 
tary Knox  in  1 790  that  1 500  persons  had  been  killed  by  Indians 
in  Kentucky  or  on  the  way  thither.  In  the  Ohio  region  they 
had  inflicted  a  terrible  defeat  on  General  St.  Clair  in  1791 — a 
defeat  still  unrepaired  when  the  European  war  broke  out.  The 
discontent  of  the  back-country  farmers  of  Pennsylvania  with 
the  excise  was  gathering  in  the  storm  that  burst  in  the  Whisky 
Rebellion  of  1794.  We  needed  peace  to  set  our  house  in  order. 
Furthermore,  a  war  with  England  would  have  had  disastrous 
economic  effects.  In  December,  1793,  Jefferson  sent  to  Congress 
an  elaborate  report  of  our  foreign  trade.  The  figures  for  the 
four  leading  commercial  countries  of  Europe  were  as  follows : 


EXPORTS  TO 

IMPORTS  FROM 

TOTAL 

Great  Britain       .    . 

$Q  /?6"?  Aid 

*T  r  28?  A">& 

&2/1  6^.8  844 

France     

A  608  7  1  ^ 

2  268  348 

6  967,083 

Holland  

I  963  880 

I   172  6<D  ' 

31  "?6  ^72 

Spain  

>*  J^O/  * 
2  -JAI  OI7 

JJJ'1  1U 

WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS 

To  go  to  war  with  England  in  the  face  of  these  figures  would 
be  to  quarrel  with  our  bread  and  butter.  England  furnished  us 
with  more  than  three  fourths  of  the  dutiable  goods  from  which 
our  national  revenue  was  collected.  9 

Finally,  war  with  England  might  have  meant  the  dissolution 
of  the  republic.  Our  people  were  divided  into  hostile  factions, 
for  the  cleft  between  Federalists  and  Republicans  opened  by 
Hamilton's  financial  program  was  widened  by  foreign  partisan- 
ship. The  Federalists  admired  the  stability  of  the  British  con- 
stitution and  were  inclined  by  political  conviction,  by  social 
instinct,  and  by  economic  interest  to  an  alliance  between  the 
government  and  "the  rich,  the  well-born,  and  the  able."  They 
hated  the  "horrid  principles  of  Jacobinism,  which  proceeding 
from  one  excess  to  another  had  made  France  a  theatre  of 
blood."  They  believed  that,  in  spite  of  England's  nonfulfill- 
ment of  the  treaty  of  1 783,  we  must  keep  on  good  terms  with  the 
nation  which  furnished  the  bulk  of  our  commerce.  On  the  other 
side,  the  Republicans,  disdaining  the  argument  of  the  pocket- 
book,  appealed  to  the  sentiments  of  generosity  and  gratitude 
in  America.  France  had  sent  us  men,  ships,  and  money  to 
help  secure  our  independence.  France  was  our  ally  now,  and 
England  a  surly  neutral.  France  was  a  republic,  proclaiming 
the  end  of  the  reign  of  despots  and  of  the  privileges  of  aristocrats 
in  the  Old  World  as  we  had  proclaimed  it  in  the  New  World. 
France  had  thrown  open  her  ports  to  us,  while  England  forbade 
us  to  use  them.  Should  we  treat  our  enemy  better  than  our 
ally?  We  had  dismissed  Genet  for  overstepping  the  bounds 
of  propriety,  but  we  tamely  allowed  England  to  retain  our  fur 
posts,  to  seize  our  ships,  and  to  impress  our  sailors.  If  the 
French  faction  did  not  want  war  with  England,  at  least  they 

»were  willing  to  go  to  the  very  verge  of  war. 
But  Washington  was  determined  to  have  peace.   In  April, 
1794,  he  appointed  John  Jay,  Chief  Justice  of  the  Supreme  / 
Court,  as  special  envoy  to  Great  Britain  to  negotiate  a  treaty. 
Jay  labored  several  months  with  Lord  Grenville  before  he  could 
bring  back  even  the  moderate  terms  contained  in  the  treaty 
which  bears  his  name.   The  British  agreed  to  give  up  the  fur 


1 76  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

>sts  by  June,  1796.  The  claims  of  England  on  account  of  the 
lebts  whose  collection  had  been  interfered  with  by  the  states, 

id  the  claims  of  the  United  States  for  damages  arising  from 
violation  of  their  neutral  rights,  were  both  to  be  referred  to 
'commissions  of  arbitration.  Trade  with  the  East  Indies  was 
freely  opened  to  the  United  States,  but  only  meager  concessions 
were  granted  in  the  West  Indian  trade.  Our  ships  could  not  be 
above  seventy  tons'  burden  and  they  might  not  carry  any 
molasses,  sugar,  coffee,  or  cotton  from  the  islands  or  from  the 
mainland  to  any  foreign  port.  On  the  question  of  stolen  slaves, 
the  stoppage  and  search  of  our  vessels,  and  the  impressment 
of  American  sailors  the  treaty  was  silent. 

Jay  brought  home  the  treaty  in  the  spring  of  1795,  and  the 
Senate  in  extra  session  ratified  it  (except  for  the  objectionable 
Article  XII  on  the  West  Indian  trade)  by  the  bare  two-thirds 
majority  necessary.  When  this  "treaty  of  amity,  commerce, 
and  navigation"  was  published,  it  raised  a  storm  of  protest  in 
the  country.  John  Jay,  a  statesman  "as  pure  as  the  ermine 
of  the  judicial  robe  which  clothed  his  shoulders,"  was  accused 
of  having  sold  his  country  to  England.  He  was  burned  in 
effigy  from  Boston  to  Charleston.  The  merchants  of  the  North 
were  indignant  over  the  commercial  clauses,  and  the  planters  of 
the  South  over  the  failure  to  secure  compensation  for  the  slaves, 
the  provisions  for  the  settlement  of  their  debts  to  British  mer- 
chants, and  the  inclusion  of  cotton  in  the  list  of  commodities 
which  could  not  be  exported  to  Europe.1  Hamilton  was  stoned 
in  the  streets  of  New  York  for  defending  Jay's  integrity  in  the 
face  of  an  angry  crowd.  Washington  was  vilified  by  the  Re- 
publican press  in  such  terms  as  he  said  "could  scarcely  be 
applied  to  a  Nero,  to  a  notorious  defaulter,  or  even  to  a  common 
pickpocket." 

^t  is  one  of  the  curious  coincidences  of  history  that  in  the  very  days  when 
Jay's  Treaty  was  being  negotiated  Eli  Whitney  was  securing  the  patent  for  his 
cotton  gin — the  invention  which  was  destined  to  make  cotton  the  most  im- 
portant of  our  exports  for  more  than  half  a  century.  As  most  of  the  debt  to 
British  creditors  was  owed  by  the  South  (Jefferson  thought  that  "Virginia  owed 
near  as  much  as  all  the  rest  of  the  states  together"),  the  significance  of  the  pro- 
hibition of  the  export  of  cotton  to  British  ports  can  be  readily  seen. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  177 

Nevertheless,  the  Jay  Treaty,  as  an  alternative  to  war,  was 
a  wise  and  statesmanlike  measure.  It  was  also  the  harbinger  of 
good  news  from  other  quarters.  While  Jay  was  in  the  midst  of 
his  negotiations  with  Grenville,  "Mad  Anthony"  Wayne  had 
completely  routed  the  Indians  under  "Little  Turtle"  and  Te- 
cumseh  at  the  battle  of  the  Fallen  Timbers  near  the  eastern 
end  of  Lake  Erie  (August  20,  1794),  and  so  wiped  out  the  dis- 
grace of  St.  Clair's  defeat  three  years  before.  The  treaty  of 
Grenville  followed  a  year  later,  by  which  the  Indians  gave  up 
all  claim  to  the  rich  bounty  lands  and  company  grants  which 
composed  over  half  the  present  state  of  Ohio.  A  treaty  with  the 
Creeks  and  Cherokees  in  the  South  (October,  1795)  brought 
peace  from  one  end  of  the  frontier  to  the  other  for  the  first  time 
since  Pontiac's  great  conspiracy  of  1763. 

This  same  eventful  year  of  1795  saw  also  the  danger  of  the 
secession  of  our  Western  territory  averted  by  the  conclusion  of 
a  treaty  with  Spain.  Thomas  Pinckney,  our  minister  to  London, 
was  sent  as  special  envoy  to  the  court  of  Madrid,  to  take  up 
negotiations  over  the  navigation  of  the  Mississippi  and  the 
boundaries  of  the  Floridas  at  the  point  where  Jay  and  Gardoqui 
had  left  them  a  decade  before  (see  page  126).  Pinckney  ar- 
rived at  Madrid  at  a  favorable  moment.  Don  Manuel  de  Godoy, 
the  all-powerful  minister,  had  just  concluded  a  treaty  with  the 
French  Republic  which  won  him  the  title  of  "Prince  of  Peace" 
and  which  exposed  his  country  to  the  danger  of  a  war  with  Eng- 
land— a  danger  which  he  saw  enhanced  by  "the  treaty  which 
unknown  to  us  the  English  cabinet  has  negotiated  with  the 
United  States  of  America"  (the  Jay  Treaty).  To  insure  our 
neutrality,  therefore,  and  to  flatter  still  further  his  own  inordi- 
nate vanity,  Godoy  signed  the  Treaty  of  San  Lorenzo  with 
Pinckney  (October  27,  1795).  Spain  recognized  the  thirty-first 
parallel  of  north  latitude  as  the  boundary  between  the  United 
States  and  Florida,  promised  to  restrain  the  Indians  from  at- 
tacking our  borders,  and  gave  us  full  and  free  right  to  navigate 
the  Mississippi  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico,  with  the  privilege  of 
transshipping  from  river  boats  to  ocean-going  vessels  at  New 
Orleans  (or  some  other  port  of  deposit)  free  of  duty.  It  was 


178  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  concession  of  every  point  that  we  had  demanded  of  Spain 
since  the  Revolution. 

The  only  European  nation  with  which  our  relations  grew 
worse  instead  of  better  during  the  closing  years  of  Washington's 
administration  was  our  old  ally  France.  It  seemed  as  if  an  evil 
genius  intervened  between  the  two  republics  in  the  last  decade 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  to  sow  misunderstanding,  suspicion, 
and  discord.  Gouverneur  Morris,  Washington's  first  minister 
to  France,  was  as  little  acceptable  to  the  radical  leaders  in  Paris 
as  their  minister  Genet  was  to  us.  Morris  was  a  high  Feder- 
alist, an  intimate  in  the  circles  of  the  court  and  the  aristocracy, 
and  a  personal  friend  of  King  Louis  XVI.  From  time  to  time 
rumors  reached  our  shores  that  he  had  been  seized  by  the 
Jacobins  and  guillotined.  His  recall  was  demanded  as  an  offset 
to  Genet's  (1794),  and  Washington  sent  in  his  stead  James 
Monroe  of  Virginia,  with  instructions  to  "show  our  confidence 
in  the  French  Republic  without  betraying  the  most  remote  mark 
of  undue  complaisance."  Monroe  was  as  pronounced  a  Repub- 
lican as  Morris  was  a  Federalist.  At  his  reception  by  the  Con- 
vention, instead  of  presenting  his  credentials  with  the  customary 
expressions  of  polite  formality,  he  made  a  warm  speech  com- 
plimenting the  republican  army  on  its  recent  victories  and 
praising  the  Jacobin  government.  He  was  embraced  by  the 
president  of  the  Convention  with  the  fraternal  kiss  amid 
thunders  of  applause. 

John  Jay  was  busy  across  the  channel  negotiating  his  treaty 
with  Lord  Grenville  when  Monroe  arrived  in  Paris.  With  more 
zeal  than  discretion  Monroe  assured  the  French  government 
that  Jay's  business  was  only  to  settle  the  disputes  over  the  fur 
posts  and  the  stolen  negroes ;  that  there  would  be  no  commercial 
treaty  made  between  the  firm  ally  and  the  bitter  enemy  of  the 
French  Republic.1  WThen,  therefore,  the  terms  of  the  Jay  Treaty 

xlt  seems  as  though  Monroe  was  justified  in  holding  this  belief,  however 
unwise  he  may  have  been  in  expressing  it.  For  Jay  in  his  instructions  had  been 
warned  against  "allowing  the  British  government  to  detach  us  from  France  or 
to  derogate  from  our  treaties  and  engagements  with  that  nation."  More- 
over, Monroe's  own  instructions  contained  such  sentences  as  these :  "  You  may 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  179 

were  known  at  Paris,  indignation  was  intense.  Monroe,  cha- 
grined, tried  to  hold  back  the  French  government  from  "ungen- 
tle remonstrances."  The  treaty,  though  ratified  by  the  Senate, 
might  still  be  made  inoperative  by  the  refusal  of  the  House,  in 
which  there  was  a  Republican  majority,  to  appropriate  the 
money  to  establish  the  joint  tribunals  which  the  treaty  called 
for.2  The  Directory  (as  the  executive  board  of  five  men  at  the 
head  of  the  French  Republic  was  called)  informed  Monroe 
bluntly  that  the  moment  the  Jay  Treaty  should  have  the  sanc- 
tion of  Congress  the  alliance  with  America  was  at  an  end.  True 
to  its  word,  the  Directory  issued  a  decree  in  July,  1796,  that  the 
Republic  would  "treat  neutral  vessels  [American]  in  the  same 
manner  as  they  suffer  the  English  to  treat  them."  Although  the 
French  minister  Adet  remained  in  this  country,  his  government 
suspended  relations  with  us  until  the  United  States  should 
"return  to  sentiments  and  measures  more  conformable  to  the 
interests  of  the  alliance  and  sworn  friendship  between  the 
two  nations." 

Meanwhile  Monroe  wa's  recalled  for  disobeying  his  explicit 
but  difficult  instructions  to  explain  our  relations  with  England 
in  a  way  satisfactory  to  the  French  Directory,  and  returned 
home  to  pour  out  his  complaint  against  the  Federalist  admin- 
istration in  a  labored  but  not  very  convincing  apology  of  over 
five  hundred  pages.  His  successor,  Charles  C.  Pinckney,  a 
Federalist  from  South  Carolina,  was  not  only  not  recognized  by 
the  Directory  but  was  not  even  given  the  "card  of  hospitality" 
which  would  allow  him  to  remain  on  French  soil.  He  retired  to 
Amsterdam  (February,  1797).  When  the  news  reached  America 
that  her  regularly  appointed  minister  to  the  foremost  power  of 
continental  Europe  had  been  treated  like  a  common  spy,  John 

declare  the  motives  of  that  mission  [Jay's]  to  be  to  obtain  immediate  compen- 
sation for  our  plundered  property  and  restitution  of  the  posts,"  and  "You  will 
be  amply  justified  in  repelling  with  firmness  any  imputation  of  the  most  distant 
intention  to  sacrifice  our  connection  with  France  to  any  connection  with 
England." 

2  It  was  not  until  April,  1796,  that  the  appropriation  was  actually  carried 
through  the  House  by  the  narrow  vote  of  51  to  48,  after  a  most  eloquent  plea 
by  Fisher  Ames  of  Massachusetts. 


i8o  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Adams,  who  had  just  succeeded  Washington  in  the  presidency, 
called  a  special  session  of  Congress  and  in  his  opening  speech 
declared  that  France  had  "treated  us  neither  as  allies  nor  as 
friends  nor  as  a  sovereign  state "  and  that  we  must  convince  her 
and  the  world  that  "we  are  not  a  degraded  people  humiliated 
under  a  colonial  spirit  of  fear."  But  still  Adams  decided,  and 
both  houses  of  Congress  agreed,  to  try  a  fresh  attempt  at  nego- 
tiation "on  terms  compatible  with  the  rights,  duties,  interests, 
and  honor  of  the  nation."  He  appointed  John  Marshall,  a 
Federalist  of  Virginia,  and  Elbridge  Gerry,  a  Republican  of 
Massachusetts,  to  join  minister  Pinckney  in  Paris,  where 
they  were  all  courteously  received  by  the  foreign  minister 
Talleyrand  (October  8,  1797). 

But  presently  the  three  envoys  were  subjected  to  the  most 
outrageous  treatment.  Certain  gentlemen  called  on  them  in  an 
unofficial  capacity,  yet  giving  them  to  understand  that  they 
represented  the  views  of  the  French  government.  These  visitors, 
who  were  undoubtedly  the  secret  envoys  of  Talleyrand,  de- 
manded three  things  as  a  preliminary  to  the  opening  of  the 
negotiations:  first,  some  passages  in  President  Adams's  speech 
to  Congress  must  be  apologized  for ;  second,  the  United  States 
must  extend  a  loan  to  the  French  Republic,  which  it  might  do  by 
buying  up  at  par  certain  Dutch  obligations  to  France  which 
were  selling  at  a  discount  of  50  per  cent ;  third,  a  little  matter  of 
$2  50,000  must  be  quietly  slipped  into  the  hands  of  the  Directors. 
The  American  commissioners  at  first  hardly  grasped  the  mean- 
ing of  these  preposterous  propositions ;  but  when  the  envoys  said 
plainly,  "You  must  pay  money,"  they  replied  as  plainly,  "No  1 
not  a  penny !  "  After  waiting  three  months  in  vain  for  any  move 
on  the  part  of  the  French  government,  the  Americans  asked 
to  be  allowed  to  return  home.  Talleyrand  prevailed  by  some 
flattery  on  the  Republican  member,  Gerry,  to  stay  for  further 
negotiations,  and  Gerry  consented  to  stay  and  be  fooled  for  a 
few  months  longer  by  that  prince  of  diplomatic  liars  and  bul- 
lies. Marshall  returned  immediately  to  the  United  States, 
and  Pinckney  was  allowed  to  take  his  sick  daughter  to  the 
south  of  France. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  181 

When  President  Adams  sent  the  dispatches  of  the  French 
commissioners  to  Congress  (April  3,  1798)  and  published  them 
to  the  nation/  Republicans  united  with  Federalists  in  a  policy 
of  preparation  for  the  war  which  the  folly  of  the  French 
Directory  seemed  determined  to  precipitate.  Harbors  were  for- 
tified, a  Navy  Department  was  created  (with  Benjamin  Stod- 
dard  of  Maryland  as  its  first  secretary),  new  frigates  were 
built,  the  army  was  enlarged,  and  Washington  was  called  to  the 
chief  command,  with  Hamilton  as  his  ranking  major  general 
and  commander  in  the  field.  A  new  tax  on  dwellings  and  slaves 
was  levied  to  yield  $2,000,000,  while  a  loan  for  $5,000,000  more 
was  authorized,  for  which  our  straitened  government  had  to 
pay  8  per  cent.  The  French  treaties  of  1778  and  the  consular 
convention  of  1788  were  abrogated.  American  privateers  were 
authorized  to  seize  French  prizes  on  the  high  seas.  War  was 
not  actually  declared,  but  a  state  of  war  existed.  Before  we 
finally  came  to  terms  with  the  French  Republic  our  com- 
manders Decatur,  Barry,  Truxton,  Bainbridge,  Porter,  and 
Hull  had  captured  over  eighty  armed  vessels  flying  the  tricolor. 
In  the  midst  of  our  war  preparations  in  the  midsummer  of  1 798 
John  Marshall  returned  from  France  with  the  first  verbatim 
report  of  the  indignities  to  which  the  commission  had  been  sub- 
jected. He  was  feted  at  dinners  where  Joseph  Hopkinson's  new 
song  "Hail,  Columbia"  was  shouted  and  the  toast  "Millions  for 
defense,  but  not  one  cent  for  tribute"  was  greeted  with  cheers. 
Adams  forwarded  Marshall's  papers  to  Congress  with  the 
spirited  message,  "I  will  never  send  another  minister  to  France 
without  the  assurance  that  he  will  be  received,  respected,  and 
honored  as  the  representative  of  a  great,  free,  powerful,  and 
independent  nation." 

The  French  Republic  did  not  want  war  with  the  United 
States.  Our  trade  was  too  valuable  to  her  West  Indian  islands, 
which,  cut  off  from  European  commerce  by  the  British  fleet 
and  given  over  wholly  to  the  production  of  sugar  and  coffee, 

aln  the  dispatches  as  published  by  Secretary  of  State  Pickering  the  names 
of  the  French  envoys  were  suppressed,  and  the  men  were  designated  simply  as 
Messrs.  X,  Y,  and  Z.  Hence  the  incident  is  called  "the  XYZ  Affair." 


1 82  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

had  to  be  fed  by  the  United  States.  Talleyrand  wanted  only  to 
levy  blackmail  on  our  government  and  bully  us  out  of  our 
treaty  with  England.  When  he  saw  the  effect  of  his  behavior, 
this  political  chameleon  quickly  changed  his  color.  He  feigned 
surprise  and  indignation  at  the  conduct  of  the  agents  whom  he 
had  sent  (doubtless  with  his  own  instructions)  to  the  American 
commissioners.  He  repudiated  them  and  all  their  works.  He 
sent  word  to  William  Vans  Murray,  our  minister  at  The  Hague, 
that  he  was  anxious  to  treat  with  America  on  an  amicable  basis, 
and  gave  assurances  in  Adams's  own  words  that  any  minister 
sent  by  the  United  States  would  be  treated  "as  the  representa- 
tive of  a  great,  free,  powerful,  and  independent  nation." 

President  Adams  wanted  war  no  more  than  Talleyrand. 
Apart  from  seeing  his  personal  rival  Alexander  Hamilton  lead- 
ing the  armies  of  the  United  States,  there  were  public  reasons 
of  great  weight.  Spain  had  made  her  treaty  with  France,  but 
was  dilatory  in  carrying  out  her  treaty  with  us  (see  page  177). 
War  with  France  would  probably  involve  us  in  war  with  Spain, 
and  war  with  Spain  would  mean  the  reopening  of  the  whole 
question  of  the  allegiance  of  our  Western  country.  How  pre- 
carious the  situation  was  can  be  seen  from  a  letter  written 
by  Fisher  Ames  to  Hamilton  in  January,  1797:  "The  western 
country  scarcely  calls  itself  dependent  on  the  Union.  France  is 
ready  to  hold  Louisiana.  The  thread  of  connection  is  slender, 
and  that  event  I  fear  would  break  it."  We  should  have  to 
invoke  the  aid  of  Great  Britain  as  the  only  country  able  to 
protect  our  shipping  against  France  and  Spain,  and  so  we 
should  be  plunged  into  the  midst  of  the  European  wars  and 
become  a  pawn  in  the  game  of  the  European  peace. 

It  took  courage  in  John  Adams,  when  the  country  was  ring- 
ing with  preparations  for  war,  to  choose  peace.  Hamilton,  the 
powerful  head  of  a  faction  opposed  to  the  President,  and  the 
real  master  of  the  two  chief  cabinet  officers,  Pickering  and 
Walcott,  wanted  war.1  Adams,  therefore,  without  consulting 

1  Hamilton  planned  to  cooperate  with  a  Venezuelan  adventurer  by  the  name 
of  Miranda  in  freeing  the  Spanish  colonies  in  South  America  and  bringing  them 
under  Anglo-American  influence  to  balance  the  power  of  France.  Hamilton 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  183 

his  cabinet  (as,  indeed,  he  was  not  legally  bound  to  do),  sent 
to  the  Senate  for  confirmation,  on  February  18,  1799,  the  name 
of  William  Vans  Murray  as  minister  to  the  French  Republic. 
In  order  to  get  the  Senate's  sanction  he  was  obliged  to  substi- 
tute a  commission  for  the  single  minister.  He  named  Oliver 
Ellsworth,  the  Chief  Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court,  and  William 
Da  vies  of  North  Carolina  (after  Patrick  Henry  had  declined) 
to  join  Murray  at  the  French  capital.  Secretary  Pickering, 
"shocked  and  grieved"  at  this  sudden  assertion  of  the  presi- 
dential prerogative,  was  able  to  delay  instructions  to  the  new 
commission  until  Adams  came  down  in  person  to  Philadelphia, 
from  his  summer  vacation  in  Massachusetts,  to  see  the  matter 
through.  The  envoys  sailed  early  in  November,  1799. 

They  were  but  four  days  out  from  port  when  one  of  the 
most  dramatic  scenes  of  modern  history  was  enacted  at  Paris. 
Napoleon  Bonaparte,  returning  from  Egypt  with  the  aureole 
of  victory  about  his  head,  overthrew  the  corrupt  Directory  and 
drove  the  protesting  deputies  of  the  French  Assembly  out  of 
their  chamber  at  the  point  of  the  bayonet.  This  famous  coup 
d'etat  made  Napoleon  master  of  France.  He  took  the  title 
of  First  Consul.  It  was  to  the  "man  of  destiny,"  then,  and  not 
to  the  "five-headed  monster  of  anarchy"  (the  Directory),  that 
the  American  commissioners  were  presented  early  in  April, 
1 800.  Their  task  was  not  hard,  for  Napoleon  was  well  dis- 
posed. He  was  not  concerned  with  the  intrigues  of  the  party 
in  Paris  which,  ever  since  the  mission  of  Genet,  had  been 
attempting  to  nourish  a  French  faction  in  the  United  States. 
He  wanted  to  inaugurate  his  usurped  regime  with  splendid  . 
military  victories  and  generous  diplomatic  triumphs.  On  Sep- 
tember 30,  1800,  a  convention  was  signed  providing  for  the 
exchange  of  consuls  and  the  regulation  of  maritime  relations 

wrote  to  Miranda  in  August,  1798:  "The  plan,  in  my  opinion,  ought  to  be  a 
fleet  of  Great  Britain  and  an  army  of  the  United  States,  and  a  government  for 
the  liberated  territory  agreeable  to  both  the  cooperators,  about  which  there  will 
be  no  difficulty.  To  arrange  the  plan  a  competent  authority  from  Great  Britain 
to  some  person  here  is  the  best  expedient.  Your  presence  here  in  that  .case  will 
be  extremely  essential.  We  are  raising  an  army  of  about  12,000  men." 


1 84  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

between  the  two  nations.  The  -First  Consul  did  not  insist  on 
the  renewal  of  the  treaties  of  alliance  and  commerce  of  1778, 
but,  as  an  offset,  he  refused  to  entertain  claims  for  damages 
done  to  our  shipping  by  French  cruisers  in  the  Franco-British 
wars.  It  was  a  fair  bargain.  It  saved  us  from  a  war  with 
France,  and  by  making  us  friends  with  the  victor  of  Marengo 
it  undoubtedly  contributed  to  our  peaceful  acquisition  of  the 
vast  Louisiana  territory  three  years  later.  The  credit  for  the 
treaty  is  due  to  John  Adams,  who  dared  to  use  his  authority 
for  the  most  unpopular  act  that  an  executive  can  perform; 
namely,  to  hold  in  peace  a  nation  that  is  set  on  war.  He  ap- 
praised his  public  services  rightly  when  he  asked  that  this  one 
alone  should  be  engraved  on  his  tombstone. 

So  the  century  closed  with  the  United  States  at  peace  with 
all  the  three  great  powers  whose  interests  and  possessions  in 
the  New  World  and  whose  wars  and  rivalries  in  the  Old  World 
threatened  to  reduce  our  country  to  the  condition  of  a  mere 
make-weight  in  the  balance  of  European  politics.  Factions  at 
home  had  thrown  us  now  into  the  arms  of  France  and  now  into 
the  arms  of  England,  while  Spanish  intrigue  threatened  to  dis- 
rupt the  Union  by  the  severance  of  our  Western  states.  Two  of 
the  treaties  made  in  this  decade  of  Federalist  power  (the  Jay 
Treaty  of  1794  and  the  French  treaty  of  1800)  saved  us  from 
imminent  war.  A  third  (the  Pinckney  treaty  of  1795)  secured 
us  the  use  of  the  Mississippi  and  so  opened  our  trans- Allegheny 
region  to  world  commerce.  To  the  remarkable  abilities  and 
patient  labors  of  the  diplomats  of  Washington's  and  Adams's 
administrations — Morris,  Marshall,  Murray,  Jay,  Ellsworth, 
and  the  Pinckneys — America  owes  a  debt  of  deepest  gratitude. 
They  did  a  large  part  in  bringing  the  country  safely  and  hon- 
orably through  the  most  difficult  and  dangerous  decade,  with 
one  exception,  in  all  its  history  since  the  adoption  of  the  federal 
Constitution. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  185 


THE  DOWNFALL  OF  FEDERALISM 

Before  Governor  Da  vies  returned  from  Paris  with  the  Napo- 
leonic convention  which  settled  the  long  dispute  with  France 
and  enabled  us  to  enter  the  new  century  at  peace  with  the 
world, — a  troubled  peace  which  was  to  last  until  our  second 
war  with  England, — an  event  of  prime  importance  had  hap- 
pened at  home  in  the  triumph  of  the  Republican  party  at  the 
polls.  The  election  of  1800  was,  with  the  exception  of  Abraham 
Lincoln's  victory  in  1860,  the  most  important  in  our  history. 
It  was  not  only  the  first  party  revolution  in  America ;  it  was  also 
the  culmination  of  a  ten  years'  struggle  of  the  agricultural  class, 
the  small  traders,  and  the  artisans,  under  the  leadership  of 
Thomas  Jefferson,  against  the  monopoly  of  public  office  and  the 
direction  of  national  policy  by  the  aristocratic  followers  of 
Hamilton,  Washington,  and  Adams.  In  the  last  section  we 
carried  the  history  of  our  foreign  diplomacy  down  to  the  close 
of  John  Adams's  administration.  We  must  now  turn  back  to 
complete  the  story  of  our  domestic  affairs  in  the  last  decade  of 
the  eighteenth  century. 

So  long  as  Washington  was  at  the  head  of  the  government 
universal  reverence  for  the  Father  of  his  Country  kept  the  fires 
of  political  passion  from  bursting  into  flame,  although,  as 
Fisher  Ames  said,  "they  glowed  beneath  the  surface  like  a 
burning  coal  pit."  Every  measure  adopted  for  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Hamiltonian  policy  of  national  concentration,  every 
move  in  the  diplomatic  game  with  Great  Britain  and  France, 
intensified  the  antagonism  between  the  Federalists  and  the 
Republicans,  the  "Anglomen"  and  the  "Jacobins."  The  Feder- 
alists were  firmly  intrenched  in  the  administration,  while  the 
Republican  opposition,  though  widespread,  was  unorganized. 
"Are  the  people  in  your  quarter  as  well  contented  with  the 
proceedings  of  our  government  as  their  representatives  say  they 
are?"  wrote  Jefferson  to  Richard  H.  Lee  in  1791 ;  "there  is  a 
vast  mass  of  discontent  gathered  in  the  South,  and  when  and 
how  it  will  break  God  knows." 


1 86  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

At  the  close  of  the  year  1793  Jefferson  resigned  from  the 
cabinet.  He  professed  to  have  done  with  politics  and  talked 
of  planting  his  cabbages  in  peace  at  Monticello.  But  even  if 
his  own  restless  political  mind  had  allowed  him  to  abjure 
politics,  he  was  too  thoroughly  committed  to  the  leadership  of 
the  Republican  cause  to  withdraw.  He  began  forthwith  an 
ardent  campaign  to  organize  the  "vast  mass  of  discontent,"  not 
only  in  the  South  but  all  over  the  land,  into  a  political  party. 
"Almost  never,"  says  Professor  Channing,  "has  a  party  been 
so  efficiently  and  so  secretly  marshalled  and  led."  Jefferson 
kept  up  an  enormous  correspondence  with  his  coworkers  from 
Massachusetts  to  Georgia.  He  pursued  his  patient  propaganda, 
making  a  gain  of  one  hundred  Republican  votes  in  this  county 
or  half  a  dozen  Republican  seats  in  that  legislature.  He  did  not 
himself  write  for  the  public,  but  he  laid  the  pens  of  able  pam- 
phleteers like  Madison,  Monroe,  Giles,  and  John  Taylor  under 
contribution,  while  he  encouraged  journalists  and  hack  writers 
to  attack  the  Federalist  doctrines  and  the  Federalist  leaders 
with  little  scruple  for  the  niceties  of  language.  As  leader  of  the 
opposition,  he  watched  the  march  of  the  administration  with 
jealous  scrutiny,  discovering  the  cloven  hoof  of  the  "monocrat" 
at  every  step. 

A  few  months  after  Jefferson's  resignation  the  farmers  of 
western  Pennsylvania  broke  into  open  revolt  against  the  tax- 
gatherers  sent  to  collect  the  excise  on  their  whisky.1  It  was  the 
first  instance  of  forcible  resistance  to  the  new  federal  govern- 
ment, and  both  Washington  and  Hamilton  were  determined  to 
crush  it  with  exemplary  severity.  The  President  called  out 
15,000  militia  from  the  states  of  Pennsylvania,  Maryland,  New 
Jersey,  and  Virginia  and  marched  with  them  himself  as  far  as 
the  town  of  Bedford,  Pennsylvania,  leaving  Hamilton  in  com- 
mand. "No  citizen  of  the  United  States,"  wrote  Washington 
on  quitting  the  expedition,  "can  ever  be  engaged  in  a  service 

1  Currency  in  the  form  of  either  specie  or  bank  paper  was  as  scarce  as  grain 
was  plentiful  in  the  back  counties.  It  cost  so  much  to  transport  the  grain  over 
the  poor  roads  to  the  East  that  the  farmers  found  it  more  profitable  to  distill 
their  corn  and  rye  and  use  the  liquor  as  currency. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  187 

more  important  to  their  country.  It  is  nothing  less  than  to  con- 
solidate and  preserve  the  blessings  of  that  Revolution  which  at 
much  expense  of  blood  and  treasure  constituted  us  a  free  and 
independent  nation."  The  insurgents  broke  up  when  they  heard 
that  a  force  three  times  as  large  as  they  could  hope  to  resist  was 
marching  on  them.  Some  of  the  ringleaders  of  the  " rebellion" 
were  arrested  and  tried,  and  two  were  condemned  to  death  for 
treason.  Washington  pardoned  them;  but  in  his  speech  to  Con- 
gress a  few  weeks  later  he  threw  the  blame  for  the  uprising  on 
the  "  self  -created  societies"  of  Democrats  which  had  multiplied 
rapidly  in  the  country  since  the  visit  of  Citizen  Genet. 

The  Republicans  under  Jefferson's  lead  attacked  the  policy 
of  the  government  in  the  Whisky  Rebellion  at  every  point.  In 
the  first  place,  the  excise  was  an  "infernal  tax,"  imposed  on  the 
farmers  for  the  benefit  of  the  capitalists  and  unnecessary  were 
it  not  for  the  swollen  interest  charges  with  which  the  fictitious 
debt  had  burdened  the  people.  Furthermore,  it  was  disgraceful 
for  a  government  founded  on  the  will  of  the  people  to  send 
thousands  of  armed  troops  against  a  few  hundred  of  its  own 
discontented  citizens  and  to  magnify  a  local  "riot"  into  a  civil 
war,  in  order  to  allow  Alexander  Hamilton  to  parade  his  "janis- 
saries." Finally,  where  was  our  boasted  freedom,  if  men  were 
to  be  condemned  for  meeting  in  "self-created  societies"  to 
criticize  freely  the  acts  of  the  public  servants  whom  they  had 
elected?  Democracy  itself  was  a  "self-created  society."  It 
would  be  at  an  end  when  the  people  were  reduced  to  silence 
under  the  censorship  of  an  autocratic,  capitalistic,  and  military 
regime.  "It  is  wonderful,"  wrote  Jefferson,  "that  the  President 
should  have  permitted  himself  to  be  the  organ  of  such  an  attack 
on  our  fundamental  liberties."  Had  he  forgotten  the  "self- 
created  societies"  of  patriots  who  had  met  at  Faneuil  Hall  and 
the  Raleigh  Tavern? 

The  treaty  which  Jay  brought  back  from  England  in  the 
spring  of  1795  (see  page  175)  furnished  further  political  capi- 
tal for  the  Republicans.  They  had  been  accused  of  obsequious- 
ness to  France  at  the  time  of  the  Genet  mission ;  now  they  could 
visit  a  like  reproach  on  the  heads  of  their  opponents.  "Mr.  Jay 


1 88  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

has  not  presented  his  country's  injuries  in  a  firm  style,"  wrote 
a  Republican  lawyer  of  Virginia  to  Madison,  "but  has  suppli- 
cated the  benevolence  of  his  Britannic  Majesty  for  relief." 
The  treaty,  said  Jefferson,  was  "an  execrable  thing,"  and  really 
nothing  less  than  "an  alliance  between  England  and  the  Anglo- 
men  of  this  country  against  the  legislature1  and  the  people  of 
the  United  States."  In  their  fight  to  prevent  the  ratification 
of  the  treaty  and  the  appropriation  of  funds  needed  to  carry 
it  into  effect,  the  Republicans  abused  the  people  of  Great 
Britain  in  unmeasured  terms  and  charged  the  government  of 
Great  Britain  with  perfidy  and  violence.  In  the  single  year 
following  the  ratification  of  the  treaty,  the  Republican  press 
asserted,  British  cruisers  had  seized  300  American  vessels  and 
impressed  1000  American  sailors.  The  only  result  of  the  mono- 
crats'  toadying  to  Great  Britain  had  been  to  alienate  our  only 
friend  (France)  without  conciliating  our  most  dangerous  enemy 
(England). 

When  the  House  finally  appropriated  the  money  for  the 
execution  of  the  Jay  Treaty  (April  30,  1796),  men's  minds  were 
already  turning  to  the  presidential  election.  Washington  re- 
fiised  to  serve  a  third  term.  It  is  not  likely  that  he  would  have 
again  received  the  unanimous  indorsement  of  the  country 
if  he  had  stood.  For  with  the  resignation  of  the  Republican 
members  of  the  cabinet  (Jefferson  and  Randolph)  he  had 
become  a  strict  Federalist,  declaring  to  General  Knox  in  1795 
that  it  would  be  "suicidal"  to  the  administration  to  appoint 
to  office  any  man  who  was  out  of  sympathy  with  its  policies. 
He  published  a  Farewell 'Address  (September  17,  1796),  in 
which,  speaking  out  of  the  bitter  experience  of  the  last  four 
years,  he  warned  his  fellow  countrymen  "to  steer  clear  of 
permanent  alliances  with  any  portion  of  the  foreign  world" 
and  to  shun  the  destructive  effects  of  the  spirit  of  faction  at 
home.  But  the  latter  counsel  fell  on  unheeding  ears.  The 

1  Jefferson  is  here  referring  to  the  bill  for  nonintercourse  with  Great  Britain 
which  was  passed  in  the  House  of  Representatives  (the  legislature)  in  the  spring 
of  1794,  but  was  defeated  in  the  Senate  by  the  casting  vote  of  Vice-President 
Adams. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  189 

Republican  press  rejoiced  openly  that  at  last  the  name  of 
Washington  was  to  "  cease  to  give  currency  to  political 
iniquity"  in  covering  the  nefarious  policies  of  Federalism  with 
its  aegis ;  and  certain  Republican  members  of  Congress,  includ- 
ing Andrew  Jackson,  refused  to  vote  the  usual  complimentary 
reply  to  the  President's  annual  message.  The  Federalists  were 
still  strong  enough  to  carry  the  election  of  1796,  although  their 
candidate,  John  Adams,  had  but  a  single  vote  beyond  the  bare 
majority  in  the  electoral  college.  Thomas  Pinckney  of  South 
Carolina  was  put  forward  by  the  Federalists  for  vice  president, 
but,  as  several  of  the  New  England  electors  refused  to  write 
his  name  on  their  ballots  with  Adams's,  his*vote  fell  behind  Jef- 
ferson's. The  figures  were  Adams  71,  Jefferson  68,  Pinckney  59. 
As  the  Constitution  then  stood  (Art.  I,  sect.  2,  par.  2),  the 
Federalist  Adams  became  president  and  the  Republican  Jef- 
ferson vice  president.1 

John  Adams  was  in  his  sixty-first  year — robust,  rotund, 
learned,  consequential,  and  fully  conscious  of  his  merits,  which 
were  great.  Coming  into  prominence  as  one  of  the  earliest 
advocates  of  the  independence  of  the  colonies  in  the  Conti- 
nental Congress,  he  had  labored  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  in 
public  station  for  the  establishment  of  the  American  Republic, 
serving  on  dozens  of  committees  in  Congress,  a  member  of  the 
peace  commission  of  1783  at  Paris,  and  the  first  minister  of 
the  new  republic  at  the  courts  of  the  Netherlands  and  Great 
Britain.  He  had  nominated  George  Washington  for  com- 
mander of  the  continental  army  and  recommended  Thomas 
Jefferson  as  draftsman  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 
In  his  "Defense  of  the  Constitutions  of  Government  of  the 
United  States,"  written  while  he  was  at  the  court  of  St.  James, 
he  had  furnished  European  political  students  with  the  first 
elaborate  and  scholarly  description  of  the  "mixed"  form  of 

lfThe  New  England  electors  "scratched"  Pinckney  because  of  a  rumor  that 
Alexander  Hamilton,  who  was  hostile  to  Adams,  would  influence  a  few  Federalist 
electors  in  the  South  to  "scratch"  Adams  and  thus  allow  Pinckney  to  be  re- 
turned as  president.  Thus  Hamilton's  little  trick  to  keep  Adams  out  of  the 
presidency  resulted  only  in  putting  Jefferson  into  the  vice  presidency. 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

government  in  the  American  democracy.  John  Adams's  patri- 
otism, rectitude,  and  courage  were  beyond  question,  but  he  was 
pompous,  intractable,  and  vain.  His  mind,  open  wide  to  the 
learned  discussion  of  political  theory,  narrowed  to  an  un- 
deviating,  rectilinear  obstinacy  in  the  execution  of  political 
authority.  The  large  receptivity  and  sustained  power  of  bal- 
anced judgment  which  characterized  George  Washington  were 
lacking  in  Adams.  A  " republican"  after  the  pattern  of  his 
great  masters  Milton,  Sidney,  Locke,  and  Harrington,  he  was 
a  convinced  believer  in  government  by  the  "natural  aris- 
tocracy," "the  rich,  the  well-born,  and  the  able,"  the  men  who 
had  property  and  reputation  at  stake.  He  feared  the  tyranny 
of  the  masses  as  much  as  he  abhorred  the  tyranny  of  the  despot. 
The  "people,"  he  believed,  are  the  very  worst  guardians  of 
their  own  interests,  being  ignorant,  fickle,  and  easily  led  by 
clever  demagogues.  Hence  "simple  democracy"  (untempered 
by  the  aristocratic  element)  was  to  him  the  "most  ignoble,  un- 
just, and  detestable  form  of  government,  its  only  excellence 
being  that  it  soon  passes  away."  A  certain  ungraciousness  of 
manner,  running  into  querulous  suspicion  when  he  was  thwarted, 
made  it  difficult  for  Adams  to  command  the  best  services  of 
his  subordinates — even  reluctant  at  times  to  care  to  com- 
mand them.  Preoccupied  with  his  own  rectitude,  he  sought  less 
and  less  to  reconcile  and  harmonize  conflicting  views  in  his 
cabinet,  his  Congresses,  and  his  party.  He  ended  by  glorying 
in  his  independence  of  them  all. 

The  difficulties  which  confronted  John  Adams  on  his  inau- 
guration in  the  spring  of  1797  were  enough  to  try  a  man  of 
consummate  tact  and  patience.  Now  that  criticism 'of  Fed- 
eralist policies  could  no  longer  be  interpreted  as  slanders  on 
the  Father  of  his  Country,  political  passions  broke  loose  in 
a  storm  of  abuse.  Men  who  had  known  each  other  for  years, 
wrote  Jefferson,  crossed  the  street  to  avoid  saluting  each  other. 
Statesmen  of  high  reputation  rivaled  the  scurrilous  hack  writers 
of  the  yellow  press  in  the  vehemence  of  their  language;  "fire 
eating  salamanders,"  "poison  sucking  toads,"  "venomous  ser- 
pents," were  some  of  the  choice  epithets  which  Fisher  Ames 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  191 

bestowed  on  his  Republican  opponents.  There  was  faction,  too, 
within  the  ranks  of  the  Federalists.  Hamilton,  although  re- 
tired to  private  life,  aspired  to  be  "the  power  behind  the 
throne."  He  wielded  enormous  influence  over  the  chief  cabinet 
officers, — the  Secretaries  of  State,  Treasury,  and  War  (Picker- 
ing, Walcott,  and  McHenry), — whom  Adams,  perhaps  out  of 
filial  respect  for  Washington,  unwisely  retained  until  near  the 
close  of  his  term.  These  men  antagonized  the  President,  be- 
trayed cabinet  secrets,  and  almost  openly  took  their  orders  from 
Hamilton.  "Either  nothing  will  be  done,"  wrote  Walcott  to 
Hamilton  on  the  occasion  of  an  important  conference  on  foreign 
policy,  "or  your  opinion  will  prevail."  Pickering  actually  apolo- 
gized to  Hamilton  for  measures  taken  by  the  President  which 
the  cabinet  were  not  able  to  prevent.  Hamilton  disliked  Adams 
on  personal  grounds  for  his  puritanism  and  pretentiousness.  He 
also  knew  that  Adams  was  no  friend  of  the  funding  measures, 
being  neither  a  stockholder  nor  a  speculator  in  government  se- 
curities, and  that  he  disliked  a  commercial  and  financial  plutoc- 
racy as  much  as  he  did  a  "simple  democracy."  But  most  of  all 
he  resented  the  President's  standing  in  the  way  of  his  military 
ambitions,  when  it  appeared  certain  that  war  with  France 
would  give  him  the  opportunity  of  joining  the  American  army 
with  the  British  fleet  in  wresting  the  South  American  republics 
and  the  region  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  from  Spanish  rule  and 
posing  as  the  patron  of  a  government  consolidated  in  an  im- 
perialistic policy.1 

When  our  indignation  with  France  over  the  X  Y  Z  Affair  was 
at  its  height  in  the  summer  of  1798  and  we  were  increasing 
our  appropriations  for  fortifications,  arms,  and  ships,  the  Fed- 
eralist Congress  passed  a  number  of  acts  which  historians  have 
unanimously  condemned  as  vindictive,  rash,  arbitrary,  and 
futile.  Since  most  of  the  immigrants  who  came  to  our  shores 
were  radicals  who  swelled  the  ranks  of  the  Republican  party,  a 
Naturalization  Act  was  passed  (June  18)  requiring  all  aliens  who 
had  come  over  since  1795  to  live  in  this  country  fourteen  years 
before  they  could  obtain  citizenship,  to  which  must  be  added 

1For  Hamilton's  scheme,  see  page  182,  note. 


192  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  seven  or  nine  years  prescribed  by  the  Constitution  before 
they  could  be  eligible  for  Congress.  A  few  days  later  (June  25, 
July  6)  came  Alien  Acts:  one  giving  the  president  power  at 
his  discretion  for  a  period  of  two  years  to  remove  from  the 
country  any  alien  whom  he  judged  dangerous  to  our  security, 
and  to  punish  with  imprisonment  those  who  remained  or  /re- 
turned in  defiance  of  his  decree ;  the  other  empowering  him  to 
arrest  or  deport  enemy  aliens  in  time  of  war.  Finally,  a  Sedition 
Act  (July  14),  to  run  to  the  end  of  Adams's  term,  punished 
with  heavy  fines  and  long  imprisonment  any  person  found 
guilty  by  the  federal  courts  of  "combining  and  conspiring  to 
oppose  the  execution  of  the  laws,  or  publishing  false  or  mali- 
cious writings  against  the  President,  Congress,  or  the  govern- 
ment of  the  United  States."  Harsh  as  these  acts  were,  they 
did  not  satisfy  the  extreme  Federalists.  Harper  of  South  Caro- 
lina, the  administration  leader  in  the  House,  would  have  shut 
the  door  to  American  citizenship  in  the  face  of  the  alien.  "It 
is  high  time,"  he  said,  "to  recover  from  the  mistake  with  which 
we  set  out  under  the  Constitution  of  admitting  foreigners  to 
citizenship,  for  nothing  but  birth  should  entitle  a  man  -to  this 
privilege."  The  Sedition  Act,  as  first  introduced  into  the  Senate 
by  James  Lloyd  of  Maryland,  declared  that  every  Frenchman 
was  an  enemy  of  the  United  States,  and  that  to  give  a  French- 
man aid  or  comfort  was  treason  punishable  with  death.  To  such 
folly  can  panic  lead ! * 

It  is  true  that  England  and  France  both  had  severe  repressive 
laws  at  this  time.  England  had  suspended  the  Habeas  Corpus 
Act,  forbidding  seditious  meetings,  and  prosecuted  a  number 
of  "agitators"  who  invoked  their  "natural  right"  of  free 
speech.  The  French  Republic  would  not  allow  an  alien  to 
remain  within'  its  borders  without  the  sanction  of  the  author- 

alt  is  only  fair  to  say  that  the  two  great  Federalist  leaders  Hamilton  and 
Marshall  opposed  this  extreme  legislation.  Hamilton  wrote  to  Walcott  (June  29) , 
"Let  us  not  establish  tyranny;  energy  is  a  very  different  thing  from  violence." 
Yet  Hamilton  was  in  favor  of  having  libels,  when  leveled  at  the  officers  of  the 
United  States,  cognizable  by  the  federal  courts,  so  that  the  reputation  of  the 
officers  of  the  general  government  "might  not  be  left  to  the  cool  and  reluctant 
protection  of  the  state  courts,  always  temporizing  and  sometimes  disaffected." 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  193 

ities  (see  the  case  of  Pinckney,  p.  179).  But  there  was  no  need 
for  such  measures  in  America.  We  were  at  peace  when  the 
offensive  acts  were  passed.  We  were  thousands  of  miles  re- 
moved from  the  storm  centers  of  Europe.  There  was  as 
little  danger  of  seeing  a  French  army  on  our  shores,  President 
Adams  remarked  testily  to  Secretary  McHenry,  as  there  was 
of  seeing  one  in  heaven.  The  Republican  leaders  like  Jeffer- 
son, Madison,  Gallatin,  and  Mason  were  no  more  connected 
with  French  plots  or  Jacobinical  intrigues  to  ruin  our  country 
than  were  their  Federalist  opponents.  All  were  sincere  patriots, 
differing  only  (even  if  differing  boisterously)  on  measures  of 
American  policy  domestic  and  foreign.1 

The  Alien  and  Sedition  Acts  met  with  instant  condemnation 
by  the  Republicans.  In  the  House,  Livingston  protested  that 
"they  would  have  disgraced  the  age  of  Gothic  barbarity,"  and 
Gallatin  reminded  the  Federalists  of  the  consecrated  principle 
of  English  liberty  from  Milton  to  Burke,  that  "error  can  be 
successfully  opposed  by  truth  with  argument  as  the  weapon." 
Jefferson,  who  from  his  point  of  vantage  in  the  vice  presidency 
kept  his  party  lieutenants  informed  of  the  temper  of  the  ad- 
ministration, wrote  to  Stephen  Mason  that  he  believed  the  acts 
to  be  "merely  an  experiment  on  the  American  mind  to  see  how 
far  it  will  bear  an  avowed  violation  of  the  Constitution."  If 
they  should  be  accepted  by  the  American  people,  he  thought, 
they  would  be  followed  by  acts  making  the  presidency  a  life 
tenure  and  finally  a  hereditary  dignity  like  the  British  crown. 
"I  fancy,"  he  added,  "that  some  of  the  State  legislatures  will 
take  strong  ground  on  this  occasion."  Yet  when  John  Taylor 
of  Virginia,  an  ardent  Republican  pamphleteer,  suggested  the 
secession  of  Virginia  and  North  Carolina  from  the  Union, 
Jefferson  rebuked  him  in  language  that  would  have  done  credit 
to  a  Webster  or  a  Lincoln. 

1  President  Adams,  much  to  the  disgust  of  the  ultra-Federalists,  declined  to 
make  a  single  arrest  or  deportation  under  the  Alien  Acts.  Ten  Republican  editors 
were  punished  by  the  federal  courts  under  the  Sedition  Act.  The  results  of  this 
policy  of  panic  were  entirely  incommensurate  with  the  excitement  aroused.  "In 
pursuing  the  offending  bee  the  Federalists  knocked  over  the  hive." 


194  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Jefferson  prepared  a  set  of  resolutions  against  the  acts  for 
the  legislature  of  North  Carolina,  but  when  unexpected  Fed- 
eralist strength  developed  in  that  state  in  the  autumn  of  1 798, 
he  transferred  them  to  the  legislature  of  Kentucky,  where  they 
were  introduced  by  John  Breckinridge  on  November  10  and 
immediately  adopted.  The  Kentucky  Resolutions,  nine  in  num- 
ber, declared  that  our  federal  government  had  been  created  by 
a  rnrnjj^rt  betwee.n_the  states  and  was  not  the  exclusive  or  final 
judge  of  the  extentof  the  autHority  delegated  to  it,  since  "that 
would  have  made  its  discretion  and  not  the  Constitution  the 
measure  of  its  powers."  The  general  government  having  been 
given  no  power  to  define  or  punish  common-law  offenses,  but 
only  those  crimes  defined  under  the  Constitution,  the  legislation 
of  the  summer  of  1798  was  usurped  in  principle  and  "altogether 
void  and  of  no  effect."  Furthermore,  it  contravened  several 
positive  provisions  of  the  Constitution,  such  as  the  guarantee 
of  free  speech  and  a  free  press  (Amendment  I),  the  protection 
against  deprivation  of  life,  liberty,  or  property  without  "due 
process  of  law"  (Amendment  V),  trial  by  jury  (Art.  Ill,  sect.  2, 
par.  3),  and  the  prohibition  of  Congress  to  interfere  before  the 
year  1808  with  "the  migration  or  importation  of  such  persons 
as  any  of  the  States  now  existing  shall  think  proper  to  admit" 
(Art.  I,  sect.  9,  par.  i).  The  legislature  of  Kentucky  called 
upon  the  legislatures  of  the  "co-states"  to  concur  in  declaring 
the  offensive  acts  "void  and  of  no  effect"  and  in  uniting  with 
her  "in  requesting  their  repeal  at  the  next  session  of  Congress." 
A  few  weeks  later  Madison  introduced  resolutions  of  the  same 
tenor  into  the  Virginia  legislature.  Without  actually  pronounc- 
ing the  acts  "void,"  Madison's  resolutions  contended  that  when 
the  government  exercised  powers  not  granted  in  the  compact, 
the  states  "have  the  right  and  are  in  duty  bound  to  interpose 
for  arresting  the  progress  of  the  evil."  Whether  the  "inter- 
position" should  take  the  form  of  petitions  to  Congress  or 
processes  in  the  courts  or  an  amendment  to  the  Constitution 
or  forcible  resistance  to  the  execution  of  the  acts,  the  Virginia 
Resolutions  did  not  say.  But  many  years  afterwards  Madison 
denied  that  there  had  been  any  idea  of  forcible  resistance  in 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  195 

either  his  or  Jefferson's  mind.  "  The  Resolutions  were  for  politi- 
cal effect,"  he  said,  "  intended  as  a  party  platform  to  arouse  the 
Republican  sentiment  throughout  the  country  and  secure  a 
general  condemnation  of  the  Federalist  centralization."  When 
all  the  states  north  of  the  Potomac  sent  unfavorable  replies 
to  the  invitation  of  the  Kentucky  legislature,  and  the  states 
south  of  the  Potomac  sent  none  at  all,  the  legislature  contented 
itself  with  reaffirming  its  protest  (November,  1799),  this  time 
declaring  explicitly  that  llnullifiGation^  by  state  sovereignties" 
of  all  unauthorized  acts  of  Congress  was  "the  rightful  remedy." 

The  Kentucky  and  Virginia  Resolutions  furnished  fine  cam- 
paign material  for  the  Republicans  in  the  election  of  1800,  as 
the  astute  Jefferson  had  foreseen.  Their  principles  were  widely 
disseminated  and  gave  rise  to  reports  by  several  state  legisla- 
tures. Vermont  repudiated  the  "compact  theory"  in  an  elabo- 
rate argument.  A  committee  of  the  Maryland  House  of 
Delegates  denied  the  competence  of  a  state  legislature  to  declare 
an  act  of  Congress  void.  The  Federalist  pamphleteer  Cobbett 
lamented  "the  imbecillity  of  our  form  of  government,"  which 
was  "a  jingling  and  chaotic  confusion  of  federal  and  state 
governments."  On  the  other  hand,  the  Republicans  maintained 
that  if  the  states  had  no  right  to  judge  when  the  Constitution 
was  violated  by  an  act  of  Congress,  they  were  reduced  to  mere 
provinces  in  a  consolidated  empire  and  might  as  well  cease  to 
elect  and  pay  their  legislatures.  They  would  soon  become,  as 
Taylor  said,  only  "speculative  commonwealths  to  be  read  for 
amusement,  like  Harrington's  'Oceana'  or  More's  ' Utopia.'" 

As  the  presidential  campaign  of  1800  approached,  it  was 
evident  that  the  election  would  be  bitterly  contested.  The 
Federalists  had  a  large  majority  in  Congress,  elected  during  the 
war  fever  of  1798.  The  offices,  of  course,  were  in  their  hands. 
But,  on  the  other  side,  the  Republicans  were  no  longer  the 
unorganized  mass  of  farmers  and  artisans  that  they  had  been 
when  Jefferson  resigned  from  the  cabinet.  The  tireless  prop- 
aganda of  the  vice  president  and  his  party  managers  had 
begun  to  bear  fruit.  A  strong  Republican  organization  flour- 
ished in  New  York,  in  spite  of  the  factional  quarrels  of  the 


1 96  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Livingstons,  the  Burrs,  and  the  Clintons.  Thomas  McLean 
carried  the  state  of  Pennsylvania  against  his  Federalist  opponent 
Ross  by  a  sweeping  majority  in  the  election  of  1797.  Even  the 
sacred  citadel  of  Federalism,  New  England,  was  rudely  invaded 
by  the  " Jacobins."  "A  considerable  change  is  working  in  the 
minds  of  the  people  to  the  Eastward,"  wrote  Jefferson  to 
Madison.  In  Massachusetts  the  vote  for  the  Republican  candi- 
date for  governor  rose  from  8000  in  1 797  to  over  1 7,000  in  1800, 
and  the  Federalists  were  obliged  for  the  first  time  to  issue 
election  addresses  to  the  "  friends  of  society,  religion,  and  good 
order"  to  support  the  administration.  The  Federalist  majority 
in  the  legislature  of  Vermont  was  reduced  in  the  election  of  1800 
from  over  100  to  34.  New  England  still  remained  in  the  Feder- 
alist column,  but  the  grip  of  the  old  aristocracy  was  loosened. 
There  was  an  enormous  increase  in  electioneering  and  popular 
meetings.  The  vote  for  governor  in  Massachusetts  increased 
over  80  per  cent  in  the  years  1798-1800. 

The  Federalists  labored  under  severe  difficulties.  As  the 
danger  of  a  serious  conflict  with  France  waned,  prosecutions 
under  the  odious  Sedition  Act  took  the  form  of  persecutions. 
In  the  exciting  days  of  1798  Congress  had  authorized  a  direct 
tax  of  $2,000,000  on  lands,  dwellings,  and  slaves,  supplemented 
by  new  stamp  duties  and  a  loan  of  $5,000,000.  When  Congress 
met  in  the  autumn  of  1799,  the  military  ardor  of  the  previous 
year  had  cooled.  The  loan  was  reduced  to  $3,500,000.  But 
falling  import  duties  had  reduced  the  revenue  by  $1,000,000, 
while  the  expenses  of  government  mounted  from  $6,000,000  in 
1797  to  $9,300,000  in  1799.  The  effect  of  the  direct  taxes  was 
already  beginning  to  be  felt.  John  Fries,  an  auctioneer  in 
Pennsylvania,  led  a  riot  against  federal  officers  who  came  to 
assess  the  window  tax.  The  farmers  shot  the  officers  in  the 
legs,  and  women  poured  scalding  water  down  on  their  heads. 
Order  was  not  restored  until  the  militia  was  called  out.  The 
Republicans  made  capital  out  of  the  economic  situation.  "The 
physician  for  the  country's  ills  is  already  at  hand  in  the  person 
of  the  tax  gatherer,"  wrote  Jefferson.  Monroe  scored  the  admin- 
istration for  "preparing  for  a  war  which  does  not  exist,  and 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  197 

expending  millions  which  will  have  no  other  effect  than  bringing 
war  upon  us."  Their  position  was  strengthened  when  the  offers 
of  conciliation  came  from  France  and  Adams  appointed  his 
second  commission  (see  page  183).  In  February,  1800,  en- 
listments were  suspended,  and  the  next  month  the  army  was 
disbanded.  Nothing  that  the  Federalist  Congress  could  have 
done  would  have  contributed  more  to  the  success  of  the  Re- 
publicans than  these  acts.  By  them,  as  Professor  Bassett  well 
says,  "the  campaign  of  1800  was  robbed  of  that  warlike  front 
behind  which  the  Federalists  for  two  years  had  found  it  so 
profitable  to  hide." 

But  the  most  serious  handicap  under  which  the  Federalists 
entered  on  the  election  of  1800  was  the  disaffection  in  their 
own  ranks.  President  Adams  had  shown  his  patriotism  in  his 
firm  stand  against  the  insults  of  the  French  Directory  and  his 
wisdom  in  accepting  their  tardy  advances  on  return  to  better 
sense.  He  had  shown  his  independence  in  preserving  his  coun- 
try's peace  at  the  expense  of  selfish  military  ambitions,  and  his 
moderation  in  refusing  to  inaugurate  a  reign  of  terror  in 
America  by  the  wholesale  arrest  of  aliens  and  the  hanging  of 
rustic  rioters.  For  these  virtues  he  was  cursed  by  the  men  of 
his  own  party,  who  had  hectored  and  thwarted  him  since 
the  beginning  of  his  administration.  These  malcontents  first 
thought  of  trying  to  persuade  Washington  to  run  for  president 
again,  but  the  great  man  died  on  December  14,  1799.  When 
it  was  clear  that  Adams  was  the  choice  of  the  majority  of  the 
party,  and  the  caucus  had  named  General  C.  C.  Pinckney  as  his 
running-mate,  the  malcontents  still  tried  to  repeat  the  trick 
of  1796  (see  page  189)  by  getting  the  electors  of  South 
Carolina  to  vote  for  Pinckney  and  Jefferson.  But  Pinckney 
honorably  refused  to  be  a  partner  to  any  such  deal,  even  though 
it  would  bring  him  the  presidency.  Hamilton,  disappointed  in 
his  military  ambitions  and  incensed  by  the  dismissal  of  his 
satellites  Pickering  and  McHenry  from  the  cabinet,  foolishly 
indulged  his  pique  by  writing  a  long  and  bitter  pamphlet  against 
Adams  and  wound  up  by  advising  the  electors  to  vote  for 
him  nevertheless! 


198  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Jefferson  was  the  unanimous  choice  of  the  Republican  cau- 
cus, with  Aaron  Burr  of  New  York  for  vice  president.  The 
Republican  platform  is  well  summed  up  in  a  letter  which 
Jefferson  wrote  to  Elbridge  Gerry  early  in  1799: 

An  inviolable  preservation  of  our  present  federal  Constitution  in 
the  true  sense  in  which  it  was  adopted  by  the  states,  ...  a  govern- 
ment vigorous,  frugal,  and  simple,  applying  all  possible  savings  of 
revenue  to  the  discharge  of  the  public  debt,  .  .  .  reliance  for  our 
internal  defense  on  our  militia  solely  until  actual  invasion,  .  .  .  free 
commerce  with  all  nations,  political  connections  with  none,  and  little 
or  no  diplomatic  establishment,  .  .  .  freedom  of  religion  and  the 
press,  .  .  .  and  an  end  of  all  violations  of  the  Constitution  to  silence 
by  force  the  complaints  or  criticisms,  just  or  unjust,  of  our  citizens 
against  the  conduct  of  their  agents. 

Behind  these  specific  points  of  policy  was  the  great  basic 
principle  of  Republicanism — the  interests  of  the  agrarian  de- 
mocracy, supported  by  state  and  local  governments,  against 
the  capitalistic  aristocracy  in  control  of  the  federal  machinery. 
The  campaign  was  violent  and  slanderous.  Jefferson  was 
accused  of  having  robbed  a  widow  and  her  children  of  trust 
funds,  of  having  vituperated  George  Washington  and  ridiculed 
the  Christian  religion.  The  Federalist  editors  predicted  dire 
consequences  if  he  should  be  elected.  Our  country  would  be 
turned  over  to  a  Jacobinical  mob,  and  every  sacred  institution 
overturned.  The  government's  obligations  would  be  repudiated, 
and  all  honest  citizens  would  be  involved  in  "one  common,  cer- 
tain, and  not  far  distant  ruin."  The  restraints  of  civilization 
would  be  cast  off,  and  "every  decent  man  would  have  to  go 
about  armed  to  defend  his  property,  his  wife,  and  his  children 
from  his  Jacobin  neighbor."  The  Reverend  Timothy  Dwight, 
president  of  Yale  College,  prophesied  that  in  the  event  of 
Jefferson's  election  "the  Bible  would  be  cast  into  a  bonfire,  our 
holy  worship  changed  into  a  dance  of  Jacobin  phrensy,  our 
wives  and  daughters  dishonored,  and  our  sons  converted  into 
the  disciples  of  Voltaire  and  the  dragoons  of  Marat."  The 
Republican  warnings,  if  less  ludicrous,  were  no  less  earnest. 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  199 

The  triumph  of  the  Federalists,  they  said,  would  mean  the 
disappearance  of  the  last  guarantee  of  democratic  government ; 
the  state  would  be  absorbed  into  a  tyrannical  oligarchy  at 
Washington,  in  disgraceful  vassalage  to  Great  Britain.  A  titled 
nobility  and  a  hereditary  monarchy  would  be  the  eventual 
outcome. 

Political  intrigue  was  added  to  frenzied  electioneering.  Penn- 
sylvania was  a  Republican  state,  but  the  Federalists,  who 
had  a  majority  in  the  upper  House,  refused  to  concur  in  the 
choice  of  electors  by  joint  ballot  until  they  were  assured  of 
seven  of  the  fifteen  electoral  votes  of  the  state.  In  New  York 
Aaron  Burr,  by  the  cleverest  arts  of  the  political  manager,  had 
secured  the  election  of  a  Republican  delegation  from  New  York 
City  to  the  legislature  in  the  spring  of  1800.  This  insured  a 
majority  in  the  new  legislature  (which  was  to  choose  the  presi- 
dential electors)  for  Jefferson  and  Burr.  Hamilton  then  wrote 
a  letter  to  Governor  Jay,  begging  him  to  reconvene  the  old 
legislature  and  have  it  hastily  pass  a  law  providing  for  the 
choice  of  the  New  York  electors  by  districts,  so  that  at  least 
four  or  five  of  its  electoral  votes  might  be  saved  for  the 
Federalists.  "No  scruples  of  delicacy  and  propriety,"  wrote 
Hamilton,  "ought  to  hinder  the  taking  of  a  legal  and  constitu- 
tional step  to  prevent  an  atheist  in  religion  and  a  fanatic  in 
politics  from  getting  possession  of  the  helm  of  state."  The 
honorable  governor  filed  the  letter  away  with  the  simple  in- 
dorsement, "Proposing  a  measure  for  party  purposes  which 
it  would  not  become  me  to  adopt."  New  York's  vote  went  to 
Jefferson,  and  with  it  the  election.  Adams  carried  New  Eng- 
land, the  stronghold  of  the  financial  interests,1  with  New  Jersey, 
Delaware,  and  parts  of  Maryland  and  North  Carolina.  He 
had  sixty-five  votes  to  seventy-three  for  Jefferson. 


1The  four  original  New  England  states  received  $440,800  in  the  interest  and 
capital  disbursements  on  the  public  debt  in  1795,  out  of  a  total  of  $1,180,909. 
Massachusetts  alone  received  in  interest  one  third  more  than  all  the  states 
south  of  the  Potomac.  "The  thrifty  Yankees  of  Connecticut  held  more  of  the 
public  debt  than  did  all  the  creditors  in  Virginia,  North  Carolina,  and  Georgia" 
(C.  A.  Beard,  "The  Economic  Origins  of  Jeffersonian  Democracy,"  p.  393). 


200  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

As  every  one  of  the  Republican  electors  had  voted  for  Burr 
as  well  as  for  Jefferson,  the  two  men  were  tied  for  first  place 
and  the  election  was  thrown  into  the  House  of  Representatives.1 
Every  Republican  elector,  of  course,  had  intended  that  Jeffer- 
son should  be  president.  Had  Burr  been  an  honorable  man, 
he  would  have  immediately  acquiesced.  But  Burr  was  not 
an  honorable  man.  Ambition  led  him  to  contest  the  election  in 
the  House  and  to  lower  his  dignity  by  accepting  the  support 
of  the  Federalists,  who  used  him  only  that  they  might  defeat 
Jefferson.  The  balloting  began  on  February  n,  1801.  On  the 
first  ballot  Jefferson  carried  eight  states  out  of  the  sixteen,  just 
one  short  of  the  necessary  majority.  Burr  carried  six,  while 
two*  (Maryland  and  Vermont)  were  equally  divided  and  lost 
their  vote.  Thirty-five  ballots  were  taken  in  the  next  five  days 
without  any  change  in  the  vote.  The  Federalists  knew  that 
they  could  not  elect  Burr,  but  they  planned  to  maintain  the 
deadlock  until  after  inauguration  day  and  then  have  a  new 
election  declared.  On  the  other  hand,  McKean  and  Monroe, 
the  Republican  governors  of  Pennsylvania  and  Virginia,  began 
to  threaten  to  call  out  their  militia  to  seat  Jefferson  in  the  White 
House  by  force.  Hamilton  too  used  his  powerful  influence  in 
favor  of  Jefferson  as  the  lesser  of  two  evils.  "As  to  Burr,"  he 
wrote,  "  there  is  nothing  in  his  favor.  He  is  truly  the  Catiline 
of  America";  whereas  Jefferson,  with  all  his  faults  and  fanati- 
cisms, was  "neither  depraved  nor  desperate."  If  elected  he 
would  probably  "pursue  a  temporizing  rather  than  a  violent 
system."  The  wisest  course  for  the  Federalists  to  follow, 
thought  Hamilton,  was  to  withdraw  their  opposition  to  Jeffer- 
son after  securing  from  him  assurances  on  some  cardinal  points 
of  policy,  such  as  the  preservation  of  the  fiscal  system,  the 
maintenance  of  the  army  and  navy,  and  the  promise  of  no 
general  proscription  of  Federalist  officials.  These  assurances 
gained,  the  Federalists  of  Vermont,  Maryland,  Delaware,  and 

1  Provision  was  made  against  the  repetition  of  this  anomaly  by  the  Twelfth 
Amendment,  in  1804,  which  prescribed  that  the  electors  "name  in  their  ballots 
the  person  voted  for  as  president  and  in  distinct  ballots  the  person  voted  for  as 
vice  president." 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  201 

South  Carolina  cast  blank  ballots  on  the  thirty-sixth  vote 
(February  17),  and  Jefferson  was  elected  by  ten  states  to  four.1 
The  Federalists,  defeated  in  the  presidency  and  both  Houses 
of  Congress,  made  an  effort  in  the  last  days  of  their  power  to 
secure  the  judicial  branch  of  the  government.  While  the  ballot- 
ing for  Jefferson  and  Burr  was  going  on,  the  expiring  House 
passed  a  Judiciary  Act  (February  13),  creating  several  new 
federal  districts  and  grouping  the  district  courts  into  six  cir- 
cuits, for  which  sixteen  new  judges  were  to  be  appointed,  with 
marshals,  attorneys,  and  clerks  to  match.  The  measure  had 
been  planned  over  a  year  before,  partly  to  provide  for  the  grow- 
ing business  of  the  federal  courts  and  partly  to  relieve  the 
justices  of  the  Supreme  Court  from  continual  traveling  on 
circuit.  But  it  was  interpreted  by  the  Republicans  as  simply 
a  trick  of  the  Federalists  to  fortify  themselves  in  the  one 
branch  of  the  government  which  was  beyond  the  reach  of 
popular  elections.  President  Adams  hastened  to  make  the 
appointments  to  the  new  judgeships  before  his  successor  should 
come  into  office.  He  was  still  signing  their  commissions  at  nine 
o'clock  of  the  evening  before  inauguration  day.  At  dawn  he 
entered  his  carriage  and  drove  away  from  the  White  House.2 

lfThe  four  old  New  England  states  held  doggedly  to  Burr  to  the  end.  The 
casting  of  blank  ballots  by  the  Federalist  representatives  from  Vermont  and 
Maryland  released  those  states  to  the  Republican  column.  As  there  were  no 
Republican  representatives  from  Delaware  and  South  Carolina,  the  final  vote 
of  those  states  was  null.  Not  a  single  Federalist,  therefore,  actually  voted  for 
Jefferson.  Much  controversy  arose  over  the  pledges  given  by  Jefferson.  It  seems 
probable  that  he  did  not  give  them  in  person,  but  let  it  be  known  through 
friends  that  he  would  respect  the  Federalist  establishments.  For  the  whole 
controversy  the  student  may  see  C.  A.  Beard's  "  The  Economic  Origins  of  Jeffer- 
sonian  Democracy,"  pp.  410  ff . 

2  Two  stories  have  been  current  touching  the  close  of  Adams's  administration : 
one  that  he  was  signing  the  commissions  up  to  midnight  of  March  the  third,  when 
Levi  Lincoln,  Jefferson's  designated  Attorney- General,  stood  over  him,  watch  in 
hand,  and  ordered  him  to  desist;  the  other,  that  Adams  drove  away  from  the 
White  House  early  to  show  his  disrespect  for  Jefferson.  Both  these  stories  are 
pure  fables.  The  reason  why  Adams  left  the  White  House  in  such  haste  was 
the  sudden  death  of  his  son  Charles  in  New  York.  He  entertained  no  ill  feeling 
toward  Jefferson.  A  few  days  after  the  inauguration  he  wrote  his  successor, 
"heartily  wishing"  him  "a  quiet  and  prosperous  administration." 


202  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  immense  significance  of  the  election  of  1800  in  our  his- 
tory has  often  been  overlooked.  Because  the  Republicans  on 
coming  into  power  did  not  destroy  the  fiscal  system  which  the 
Federalists  had  set  up  or  propose  sweeping  amendments  to 
the  Constitution  curtailing  the  federal  power,  historians  have 
spoken  of  the  "meagre  results  of  the  Jeffersonian  revolution." 
But  that  is  to  miss  the  point  by  too  great  absorption  in  insti- 
tutional history,  to  the  neglect  of  social  and  ethical  currents. 
The  triumph  of  Jefferson  at  the  polls  was  the  indorsement  of 
a  process  of  political  education  which  had  been  going  on,  under 
his  chief  leadership,  for  a  decade — an  education  in  democracy. 
The  Federalists  were  without  faith  in  the  people.  For  them 
government  belonged  by  right  to  "the  rich,  the  well-born,  and 
the  able,"  whom  the  people  were  to  "venerate."  The  suffrage 
was  narrowed  by  property  qualifications  and  religious  tests.  In 
New  England  "magistrates  were  often  chosen  by  one  twentieth 
of  the  legal  voters."  The  few  families  who  assumed  leadership 
during  the  Revolution  had  acquired  "an  unrepublican  ascend- 
ency," which  made  them  "regard  any  opposition  as  actual  re- 
bellion against  the  reigning  powers."  They  refused  to  recognize 
the  Republicans  as  a  legitimate  party,  calling  them  "insur- 
gents," "factional  Jacobins,"  "unprincipled,  disorderly,  am- 
bitious, disaffected,  morose  men,"  who  were  tempted  by  vile 
newspapers  "to  talk  on  political  subjects  and  to  wish  to  manage 
the  affairs  of  the  nation,"  instead  of  submitting  themselves  to 
those  who  were  "over  them  in  the  Lord."  As  against  this 
debasing  doctrine  of  tutelage  the  Republicans  vindicated  the 
principles  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence.  "There  was  a 
time  in  this  country,"  wrote  a  Republican  journalist,  "when 
God  had  created  all  men  equal  and  had  given  to  each  certain 
unalienable  rights,  but  the  new  creation  of  Federalism  has 
thrown  into  confusion  the  first  creation.  It  has  created  four 
or  five  hundred  gentlemen  having  entire  right  to  rule  and  reign." 

The  Jeffersonian  doctrine  of  "the  cherishment  of  the  people" 
conceived  of  the  government  not  as  a  power  outside  of  and 
above  the  people  but  as  the  people  itself  acting  in  its  politi- 
cal capacity.  It  necessitated  the  greatest  possible  diffusion  of 


WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS  203 

power  among  a  progressively  educated  body  of  citizens,  so  that 
the  evils  inevitably  arising  in  a  democracy  might  be  slowly 
purified  out  through  the  aeration  of  public  opinion.  Instead 
of  abandoning  "the  detestable  practice  of  electioneering,"  and 
passively  "  venerating  the  men  of  their  former  choice,"  as  they 
were  bidden  to  do  by  the  Federalists,  the  people  should  be 
roused  to  "an  universal  attention  to  the  duty  of  election." 
A  jealous  watch  on  their  rulers  was  their  only  guarantee  of  free- 
dom. Their  liberties  were  too  precious  to  delegate  to  an  aristoc- 
racy. The  propagation  of  this  democracy  was  the  Jeffersonian 
campaign,  and  the  election  of  1800  was  but  its  culmination. 
The  enormous  growth  of  the  vote  even  in  New  England,  out 
of  all  proportion  to  the  increase  in  population,  was  a  witness  to 
the  progress  of  the  Jeffersonian  ideal,  for  the  figures  show  that 
the  Republican  vote  was  not  taken  away  from  the  Federalists 
but  was  rather  added  to  theirs.  Politics  were  popularized. 
Addresses,  platforms,  pledges,  discussions,  multiplied.  The 
people  woke  to  their  privileges  and  responsibilities.  "Now  the 
Revolution  of  1776  is  complete,"  said  the  Aurora  on  the  morn- 
ing after  the  election.  Since  1800  no  political  party  in  our 
land,  Whig  or  Democrat,  Republican  or  Socialist,  Prohibitionist 
or  Populist,  has  made  its  appeal  to  any  less  comprehensive  ari 
electorate  than  the  whole  body  of  American  freemen. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES 

A  just  and  solid  republican  government  maintained  here  will  be  a  standing  mon- 
ument and  example  for  the  aim  and  imitation  of  the  people  of  other  countries; 
and  I  join  with  you  in  the  hope  and  belief  that  they  will  see  from  our  example 
that  a  free  government  is  of  all  others  the  most  majestic. — THOMAS  JEFFERSON 

THE  LOUISIANA  PURCHASE 

Thomas  Jefferson  was  nearing  the  closing  of  his  fifty-eighth 
year  when  he  was  inaugurated  in  the  new  federal  city  of  Wash- 
ington. Both  the  place  and  the  man  were  suggestive  of  a  new 
chapter  in  our  history.  Swamp  land  and  forest  formed  the 
lonely  environs  of  the  few  residences,  boarding-houses,  and 
shops  that  were  scattered  among  the  rising  public  buildings. 
The  stately  Pennsylvania  Avenue  of  today  was  "  scarcely  more 
than  a  footpath  cut  through  the  bushes  and  briars/7  with  gravel 
and  chipped  freestone  dumped  on  the  spongy  patches  left  by 
the  Tiber  Creek,  which  ran  hard  by.  The  contrast  with  the 
lively  city  of  Philadelphia,  the  center  of  the  colonial  aristoc- 
racy, was  striking.  "We  need  nothing  here,"  wrote  Gouverneur 
Morris  in  humorous  vein,  "but  houses,  men,  women,  and  other 
little  trifles  to  make  our  city  perfect."  The  new  president,  who 
had  never  felt  at  home  in  the  aristocratic  circles  of  New  York 
and  Philadelphia,  left  the  pomp  and  ceremony  of  the  Federalist 
regime  behind  him.  Instead  of  driving  with  coach  and  six  to 
the  inaugural,  he  walked.  In  the  place  of  the  speech  to  Con- 
gress, so  reminiscent  of  an  address  from  the  throne,  he  sent  a 
written  message.  The  stiff  weekly  levees  were  superseded  by 
receptions  to  which  everyone  was  welcome  to  come  pele-mele  to 
shake  the  President's  hand.  The  British  minister  Merry  was 
scandalized  when  Jefferson  received  him  in  negligee  with  slip- 
pers run  down  at  the  heels,  and  Merry's  secretary  said  that  the 

204 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  205 

President  reminded  him  of  "a  tall  large-boned  farmer" — a 
characterization  which  Jefferson  would  probably  have  felt  to 
be  flattering. 

Jefferson's  political  views  were  well  known  through  the  pub- 
licity of  his  long  struggle  against  the  Federalists,  and  they  were 
concisely  summed  up  at  the  close  of  his  inaugural  address: 
equal  and  exact  justice  to  men  of  every  shade  of  political  and 
religious  opinion;  peace  and  friendship  with  all  nations,  alli- 
ances with  none;  respect  for  the  rights  of  the  state  govern- 
ments, together  with  the  preservation  of  the  powers  of  the 
national  government  in  strict  accord  with  the  provisions  of  the 
Constitution;  free  elections,  free  speech,  and  a  free  press,  but 
obedience  to  the  law  as  expressed  in  the  will  of  the  majority; 
reliance  on  a  disciplined  militia  rather  than  on  a  regular  army 
for  our  defense ;  public  economy,  honest  payment  of  our  debts, 
encouragement  of  agriculture  and  commerce,  preservation  of 
the  sacred  rights  of  Habeas  Corpus  and  trial  by  jury ;  trust  in 
persuasion  rather  than  in  force  to  right  abuses  and  win  policies, 
since  "  error  of  opinion  may  be  tolerated  when  reason  is  left 
free  to  combat  it."  Political  enemies  were  astonished  at  the 
President's  conciliatory  tone  when  he  declared  that  differences 
of  opinion  were  not  always  differences  of  principle,  and  that  all 
were  brethren  in  their  common  devotion  to  the  Union :  "  We  are 
all  Republicans,  we  are  all  Federalists."  Did  he  mean  that  he 
hoped  that  all  the  Federalists  were  about  to  become  Repub- 
licans, or  that  in  the  hands  of  a  Republican  administration  the 
measures  established  by  the  Federalists  could  be  safely  oper- 
ated ?  His  whole  administration  goes  to  prove,  at  any  rate,  that 
he  considered  the  government  safe  in  the  hands  of  the  friends 
of  the  people,  even  if  they  took  as  great  liberties  with  the  letter 
of  the  Constitution  as  did  the  "monocrats." 

If  followers  hoped  or  opponents  feared  that  Jefferson  would 
make  any  drastic  change  in  the  institutions  of  the  Federalists, 
they  were  mistaken.  Hamilton  had  correctly  estimated  the 
new  president  as  more  revolutionary  in  theory  than  in  action. 
The  Bank  and  the  public  funds  remained  undisturbed.  The 
military  and  naval  establishments,  while  diminished,  were  not 


206  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

abolished.  One  might  have  expected  the  author  of  the  Kentucky 
Resolutions  to  initiate  some  measures  for  the  curtailment  of 
the  powers  of  the  "general  government,"  but  instead  Jefferson 
announced  in  his  inaugural  address  and  supported  in  his  policy 
"the  preservation  of  the  general  government  in  its  whole  Consti- 
tutional vigor  as  the  sheet  anchor  of  our  peace  at  home  and  of 
our  safety  abroad."  One  might  have  thought  that  so  bitter  a 
critic  of  the  "dangerous"  power  of  the  federal  judiciary  would 
have  suggested  to  his  Republican  Congress  (which  he  controlled 
with  a  mastery  equaled  by  few  of  our  presidents)  the  passage 
of  an  amendment  limiting  the  tenure  or  the  power  of  the  justices 
of  the  Supreme  Court;  but  he  made  no  such  move.  The  sum 
total  of  his  assault  on  the  institutions  of  his  Federalist  predeces- 
sors was  the  abolition  of  the  internal  revenue  duties,  the  reduc- 
tion of  the  military  establishment,  and  the  repeal  of  the  Judiciary 
Act  of  the  closing  days  of  John  Adams's  administration. 

For  the  two  chief  portfolios  of  State  and  Treasury,  Jefferson 
selected  James  Madison  of  Virginia  and  Albert  Gallatin  of 
Pennsylvania,  both  men  of  long  and  influential  experience  in 
Congress.  Henry  Dearborn  and  Levi  Lincoln,  both  of  Massa- 
chusetts, were  made  Secretary  of  War  and  Attorney-General 
respectively,  and  Gideon  Granger  of  Connecticut  was  put  at 
the  head  of  the  post  office.  The  Navy  Department  was  given 
to  Robert  Smith  of  Maryland.  Thus  the  heads  of  half  the 
executive  departments  were  chosen  from  New  England,  the 
stronghold  of  Federalism,  whose  electors  had  cast  but  a  single 
vote  for  Jefferson  in  the  February  balloting.  Madison  was 
the  only  member  of  the  cabinet  from  the  states  south  of  the 
Potomac,  and  even  he,  according  to  the  simon-pure  Republicans 
of  Virginia  and  the  Carolinas,  was  somewhat  tainted  with 
heresy  from  his  former  association  with  Hamilton  in  the  author- 
ship of  "The  Federalist."  If  Jefferson  meant  by  this  recog- 
nition of  the  North  in  his  choice  of  advisers  to  discourage  the 
idea  that  the  Republicans  were  a  sectional  party,  it  remained  , 
none  the  less  true  that  with  the  coming  of  his  administration 
political  leadership  passed  to  the  South.  Samuel  Smith  of 
Maryland,  Randolph  and  Giles  of  Virginia,  and  Macon  of 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  207 

North  Carolina  dominated  the  House,  where  the  Republicans 
had  a  majority  of  over  two  to  one.  The  Northern  states  saw 
measure  after  measure  passed  which  they  believed  prejudicial 
to  their  political  prestige  and  their  economic  interests,  and  more 
than  once  during  this  period  of  Southern  control  (in  1804, 
1808,  and  1814)  they  mooted  separation  from  the  states  beyond 
the  Delaware. 

In  the  closing  month  of  his  term  President  Adams  had  sent 
over  two  hundred  nominations  to  the  Senate.  This  attempt  to 
saddle  on  the  incoming  administration  a  host  of  Federalist 
officeholders  by  " midnight"  appointments  Jefferson  considered 
positively  indecent.  He  spoke  of  Adams's  "dead  clutch  on  the 
patronage,"  and  sent  word  to  the  officers  whose  commissions 
had  not  yet  been  delivered  to  consider  their  appointments  as 
never  having  been  made.  A  certain  William  Marbury,  who  was 
one  of  the  forty-two  justices  of  the  peace  appointed  for  a  five- 
year  term  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  sued  the  Secretary  of 
State  for  the  delivery  of  his  commission.  When  the  case  of 
Marbury  vs.  Madison  came  before  the  Supreme  Court  in  its 
February  session  of  1803,  it  brought  a  momentous  decision 
from  Chief  Justice  Marshall.  The  court  refused  to  issue  the 
mandamus  compelling  the  delivery  of  the  commission,  and  de- 
clared that  that  part  of  the  Judiciary  Act  of  1789  which  con- 
ferred upon  it  this  power  was  unconstitutional  and  hence  null 
and  void.  It  was  the  first  instance  of  the  annulment  by  the 
Supreme  Court  of  an  act  of  Congress,  the  first  assumption  of  the 
power,  nowhere  granted  to  the  court  by  the  Constitution,  of 
declaring  acts  of  Congress  unconstitutional.  This  precedent, 
followed  ever  since,  has  made  the  Supreme  Court,  which  was 
established  as  a  judicial  tribunal,  one  of  the  most  powerful 
political  influences  in  our  history.  For  example,  in  1895,  by 
the  majority  of  a  single  vote,  it  declared  the  income-tax  clause 
of  the  Wilson-Gorman  tariff  bill  unconstitutional  and  deprived 
the  government  of  millions  of  dollars  of  revenue.  The  new 
circuit  judgeships  which  had  been  created  by  the  Judiciary  Act 
of  February  13,  1801,  and  which,  according  to  John  Randolph's 
sarcastic  comment,  were  provided  in  order  to  make  the  judicial 


20$  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

department  "a  hospital  for  decayed  politicians,"  were  abolished 
by  the  repeal  of  the  act. 

Economy  was  the  chief  policy  of  the  new  administration,  and 
to  this  policy  Jefferson  was  impelled  by  both  political  and 
economic  principles.  The  collection  and  disbursement  of  large 
sums  of  money  tempted  the  central  government  to  enlarge  its 
powers,  to  compete  with  European  nations  in  world  politics, 
and  to  encroach  on  the  resources  which  the  states  needed  for 
their  local  development.  The  central  government  should  con- 
fine itself  to  provision  for  defense  against  invasion  and  should 
reduce  its  connection  with  foreign  countries  to  the  lowest  terms 
possible.  Two  or  three  foreign  ministers  only  were  necessary 
(to  England,  France,  and  Spain,  with  whom  we  unfortunately 
still  had  unsettled  relations),  but  diplomatic  establishments  in 
Holland,  Portugal,  and  Prussia  were  a  needless  extravagance 
and  were  forthwith  suppressed.  Again,  as  champion  of  the 
agricultural  interests,  Jefferson  saw  that  the  burden  of  taxation, 
on  which  the  credit  of  the  public  funds  was  based,  fell  largely 
upon  the  farmers.  Not  only  must  these  chief  producers  of  the 
country's  wealth  not  be  further  burdened  by  additions  to  the 
public  debt  but  even  that  burden  which  was  upon  them  must 
be  lightened  as  soon  as  possible  by  the  discharge  of  the  debt. 

Secretary  Gallatin  was  even  more  enamored  of  economy 
than  was  the  President.  Coming  from  Switzerland,  he  had 
found  a  home  as  a  naturalized  American  citizen  among  the 
farmers  of  western  Pennsylvania,  whose  cause  he  had  espoused 
in  the  Whisky  Rebellion.  He  was  gifted  with  an  orderly  mind, 
considerable  powers  of  persuasion,  and  a  prodigious  capacity 
for  work.  He  has  generally  been  rated  as  second  only  to 
Alexander  Hamilton  in  the  skillful  management  of  our  coun- 
try's finances.  His  special  merit,  perhaps,  was  the  introduction 
of  strict  accountability  into  our  finances  by  the  budget  system 
of  specific  appropriations  against  which  only  funds  pertinent 
to  the  appropriations  could  be  drawn.  Gallatin  outlined  his 
policy  in  his  first  report.  Retrenchment  in  army,  navy,  and 
the  diplomatic  service,  together  with  various  economies  in  the 
civil  service,  were  calculated  to  reduce  the  expenditures  of  the 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  209 

government  from  $7,000,000  to  $3,000,000,  exclusive  of  interest 
on  the  public  debt.  The  revenue  had  grown,  as  a  result  of  our 
prosperous  foreign  commerce  in  the  midst  of  the  European 
wars,  from  less  than  $4,000,000  in  1792  to  over  $10,000,000  in 
1 80 1.  Gallatin  far  too  modestly  estimated  the  revenue  for  the 
next  ensuing  years  at  $10,600,000.  Thus  there  would  be  an 
annual  surplus  of  over  $7,000,000  for  application  to  the  interest 
and  principal  of  the  public  debt.  On  the  basis  of  these  figures 
the  debt  would  be  entirely  wiped  out  by  the  year  1817.  Gal- 
latin's  plans  were  rudely  interrupted  by  the  distress  of  our 
commerce  and  the  outbreak  of  our  second  war  with  England 
before  the  year  1817,  but  they  progressed  so  well  during  the 
first  decade  that  by  1810  the  debt  was  reduced  by  $27,500,000, 
in  spite  of  the  purchase  of  Louisiana  from  France  and  the 
expense  of  four  years  of  warfare  against  the  African  pirates 
in  the  Mediterranean. 

Gallatin  was  compelled  reluctantly  to  sacrifice  important 
sources  of  revenue.  The  excise  tax  was  particularly  odious  to 
the  Republicans.  It  had  an  ugly  name  among  the  advocates 
of  states'  rights.  It  had  caused  the  Whisky  Rebellion  and  the 
first  " armed  invasion"  of  a  state  by  the  national  power.  It 
had  provoked  the  Fries  riot.  It  was  inquisitorial  and  bore  hard 
on  the  farmer  distiller.  Besides,  it  cost  about  20  per  cent  for 
collection  as  against  3  per  cent  for  customs  duties.  Jefferson 
was  determined  that  it  should  be  abolished;  and  abolished  it 
was,  in  April,  1802,  with  a  loss  of  a  million  dollars  to  the 
Treasury.  The  repeal  of  the  excise  was  a  genuine  self-denying 
ordinance,  for  it  cut  down  the  patronage  of  the  administration 
nearly  50  per  cent. 

Gallatin  was  obliged  also  to  give  up  the  anticipated  retrench- 
ments in  the  Navy  Department.  The  army,  to  be  sure,  was 
reduced  after  the  passing  of  the  war  scare  of  1798  to  its  meager 
footing  in  Washington's  day,  and  a  beginning  was  made  in  the 
curtailment  of  the  navy  by  stopping  the  work  on  six  "  seventy- 
fours"  which  had  been  authorized  by  Adams's  Congress  and 
selling  off  all  the  warships  but  thirteen.  The  remnant  of  our 
navy  Jefferson  would  have  laid  up  in  the  eastern  branch  of 


210  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  Potomac,  where  they  could  be  looked  after  "by  one  set  of 
plunderers."  But  the  administration  was  only  a  few  weeks  old 
when  the  bashaw  of  Tripoli  declared  war  on  the  American 
republic.  It  was  the  culmination  of  a  sordid  business  in  the 
Mediterranean  which  had  disgraced  our  government  since  the 
days  of  the  Confederation.  The  rulers  of  the  Barbary  States 
of  the  northern  African  coast — Morocco,  Algiers,  Tunis,  arid 
Tripoli — had  long  been  in  the  habit  of  seizing  the  ships  of 
Christian  nations  in  the  Mediterranean  and  holding  the  crews 
for  heavy  ransom.  It  was  a  more  convenient  way  of  raising 
revenue  than  the  precarious  dependence  on  a  corrupt  tax- 
gatherer,  and  it  had  the  further  advantage  of  harrying  the 
enemies  of  Allah.  The  European  nations,  even  including  Eng- 
land, the  mistress  of  the  seas,  paid  tribute  to  these  Moham- 
medan pirates  as  a  cheap  substitute  for  war.  Jefferson,  in  the 
days  of  his  mission  to  Paris  (1785-1789),  had  tried  to  induce 
the  governments  of  Europe  to  create  a  joint  naval  force  to 
police  the  Mediterranean,  and  again  as  Secretary  of  State  he 
had  advocated  punishing  the  pirates.  But  our  government  fol- 
lowed the  example  of  Europe  and  sent  presents  and  tribute  to 
the  deys  and  bashaws  to  buy  our  right  to  travel  on  the  high 
seas.  Under  Washington  and  Adams  the  tribute  we  paid  to 
the  Mediterranean  pirates  amounted  to  $2,000,000.  But  when 
the  dey  of  Algiers  compelled  the  very  vessel  which  was  bring- 
ing him  tribute  (her  name  was  the  George  Washington  \ )  to 
raise  the  Algerian  flag  at  her  masthead  and  sail  on  an  errand 
to  the  Sultan  of  Turkey,  and  the  bashaw  of  Tripoli,  unsatisfied 
with  his  meager  $80,000  of  tribute  money,  declared  war  on  the 
United  States,  our  patience  was  exhausted. 

Jefferson  sent  successive  squadrons  under  Commodores  Dale, 
Morris,  Preble,  and  Barron  to  chastise  the  Barbary  corsairs. 
Devoted  as  he  was  to  peace  and  economy,  he  had  always 
advocated  a  naval  force  in  the  Mediterranean  as  both  the  most 
humane  and  the  cheapest  way  of  dealing  with  the  pirates, 
writing  in  1802  that  "  preserving  an  erect  and  independent 
attitude"  was  even  more  important  than  peace.  Gallatin  hated 
to  spare  the  money  for  the  naval  war,  but'  the  imposition  of 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  211 

a  2^  per  cent  import  duty  to  create  a  special  "Mediterranean 
fund"  relieved  the  Treasury  and  emphasized  the  temporary 
character  of  the  expense.  Our  sailors  in  the  Mediterranean 
added  fresh  laurels  to  the  fame  of  the  American  navy.  No  deed 
of  John  Paul  Jones  in  the  American  Revolution  was  more 
glorious  or  daring  than  the  exploit  of  Lieutenant  Stephen 
Decatur,  who  with  a  few  men  ran  into  the  harbor  of  Tripoli 
in  the  night  of  February  16,  1804,  boarded  the  frigate  Phila- 
delphia, which  had  fallen  into  the  hands  of  the  corsairs,  over- 
powered her  crew,  set  fire  to  her  hull,  and  rowed  back  to  his 
ship  in  the  light  of  the  conflagration  and  of  a  murderous  fire 
from  the  Tripolitan  batteries.  The  Barbary  wars  lasted  through 
the  first  administration  of  Jefferson.  But  when  our  government 
finally  made  peace  with  Tripoli,  on  January  3,  1805,  "on  more 
honorable  terms,"  as  Preble  said,  "than  any  other  nation  had 
ever  been  able  to  command,"  the  sacrifices  which  we  had  made 
appeared  fully  justified.  We  had  not  only  vindicated  the  right 
of  our  vessels  to  sail  the  high  seas  without  molestation,  but 
incidentally  we  had  rendered  the  maritime  nations  of  Europe  a 
service  which  they  ought  long  before  to  have  performed  for 
themselves,  in  clearing  the  pirates  out  of  the  Mediterranean. 
While  these  things  were  going  on  abroad  the  Republicans  at 
home  were  delivering  an  assault  on  what  they  called  "the 
stronghold  of  Federalism,"  namely,  the  judiciary.  A  number  of 
federal  judges  were  impeached  in  Pennsylvania.  John  Picker- 
ing, a  judge  of  a  federal  district  court  in  New  Hampshire,  was 
condemned  and  removed  by  the  Senate  on  charges  of  gross 
misconduct,  although  it  was  shown  that  he. was  suffering  from 
insanity  and  thus  not  responsible  for  his  behavior.  He  should 
have  been  quietly  dismissed.  On  the  same  day  that  Pickering 
was  condemned  the  House  brought  impeachment  charges 
against  Justice  Samuel  Chase  of  the  Supreme  Court.  Chase 
was  a  signer  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  and  a  hero  of 
the  Revolution.  He  had  been  appointed  to  the  Supreme  Court 
by  Washington  in  1796.  He  was  an  ardent  Federalist  and  had 
presided  with  more  zeal  than  prudence  over  the  cases  of  Re- 
publican editors  prosecuted  under  the  Sedition  law.  He  was 


212  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

even  guilty  of  having  turned  his  charges  to  juries  into  intem- 
perate political  harangues  against  Republicanism  as  the  gov- 
ernment of  the  mob,  which  would  soon  bring  ruin  upon  our 
institutions.  These  were  grave  lapses  from  dignity  in  a  judge 
of  the  Supreme  Court,  but  they  could  hardly  be  classed  with 
"high  crimes  and  misdemeanors"  (like  treason  or  corruption) 
which  the  Constitution  declares  a  basis  for  the  impeachment 
of  federal  officers.  After  an  exciting  trial,  in  which  John 
Randolph  outdid  himself  in  violence  and  vituperation  to  secure 
the  condemnation  which  President  Jefferson  desired  as  much  as 
he,  the  Senate  acquitted  Chase,  on  March  i,  1805,  and  impeach- 
ment of  judges  for  political  reasons  came  to  an  end. 

However,  it  was  not  for  its  political  reforms  or  financial 
economies,  not  for  the  victory  over  the  pirates  or  the  contests 
with  Federalists  at  home,  that  Jefferson's  first  administration 
was  chiefly  distinguished,  but  for  its  extension  of  our  national 
domain.  Jefferson  was  an  expansionist.  His  interest  in  the 
country  west  of  the  Alleghenies,  and  even  in  the  great  wilder- 
ness beyond  the  Mississippi,  was  constant  from  the  earliest 
days  of  the  republic.  It  was  he  who  had  drafted  the  Ordinance 
of  1784  for  the  government  of  the  Western  territory,  and  by 
the  adoption  of  many  of  his  ideas  three  years  later  in  the  famous 
Northwest  Ordinance,  had  set  the  impress  of  his  genius  on  a 
policy  of  territorial  government  which  was  to  endure  for  a 
century.  When  he  was  on  the  Paris  mission  (1785-1789)  he 
had  encouraged  a  New  England  traveler  named  Ledyard  to 
cross  Siberia  and  the  Pacific  and  return  to  the  United  States 
through  the  vast  unexplored  territory  of  the  Spaniards  to  the 
west  of  the  Mississippi.  When  the  Nootka  Sound  controversy 
arose  between  England  and  Spain  in  1790  (see  page  169)  he 
showed  himself  the  most  anxious  member  of  Washington's 
cabinet  for  the  safeguarding  of  our  interests  in  the  West.  He 
regarded  the  English  settlements  on  the  Atlantic  coast  as  "the 
nest  from  which  America  north  and  south  was  to  be  peopled" 
and  foresaw  a  republic  of  a  hundred  million  in  the  great  western 
continent.  He  had  not  been  in  the  presidency  ten  weeks  before 
news  came  from  our  minister  in  London,  Rufus  King,  of  a 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  213 

transaction  in  Europe  that  was  destined  to  have  an  incalculable 
influence  on  our  history.  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  on  the  day  after 
he  had  concluded  the  convention  of  peace  with  the  United 
States  (see  page  183),  had  compelled  the  king  of  Spain  to  sign 
the  treaty  of  San  Ildefonso  ceding  to  him  the  entire  province 
of  Louisiana  (October  i,  1800).  " Spain  is  ceding  Louisiana 
to  France/'  wrote  Jefferson  to  Robert  Livingston  at  Paris,  "an 
inauspicious  circumstance  to  us." 

The  circumstance  was  inauspicious  for  several  reasons.  It 
meant  the  establishment  of  the  strongest  and  richest  of  the 
European  countries  as  a  colonial  power  on  our  borders,  and 
perhaps  in  control  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  and  the  islands  com- 
manding its  entrance.  It  meant  the  substitution  of  the  restless 
and  unpredictable  ambition  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte  in  the 
Western  Hemisphere  for  the  supine  and  dilatory  policy  of  the 
court  of  Spain.  It  meant  the  control  of  the  Mississippi,  through 
the  possession  of  New  Orleans,  by  a  power  no  more  friendly 
than  Spain  to  the  United  States,  but  infinitely  more  able  to 
paralyze  our  commerce  on  the  great  river.  Since  the  few  thou- 
sands of  pioneers  had  followed  Boone,  Sevier,  Harrod,  and 
Robertson  across  the  mountains  in  the  days  of  the  Confeder- 
ation, our  Western  settlements  had  grown  apace.  The  opening 
of  the  nineteenth  century  saw  some  50,000  farmers  established 
in  the  rich  bottom  lands  along  the  Ohio  River  and  its  northern 
tributaries.  A  hundred  thousand  immigrants  had  beaten  the 
buffalo  paths  and  Indian  trails  of  Tennessee  into  pack  roads 
and  begun  clearing  the  hickory  and  sycamore  forests  for  their 
corn  and  tobacco,  their  hogs  and  cattle.  Over  200,000  had 
gone  into  Kentucky.  The  outlet  for  the  increasing  products 
of  all  this  "back  country"  was  the  great  river.  "The  Missis- 
sippi is  everything  to  them,"  wrote  Madison  in  1802 ;  "it  is 
the  Hudson,  the  Potomac,  the  Delaware,  and  all  the  navigable 
rivers  of  the  Atlantic  coast  formed  into  one."  After  a  dozen 
years  of  tedious  negotiation  with  the  Spanish  court  we  had,  in 
1795,  obtained  a  treaty  giving  us  the  right  of  deposit  and 
transshipment  at  New  Orleans.  The  customhouse  books  of 
1802  showed  exports  from  the  port  of  New  Orleans  of  over 


214  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

$3,000,000  of  sugar,  $1,000,000  of  cotton,  200,000  Ib.  of 
tobacco,  nearly  10,000  bbl.  of  flour,  besides  large  amounts 
of  cordage,  cider,  apples,  bacon,  pork,  and  lead.  Most  of  the 
articles,  except  the  sugar  and  cotton,  came  from  the  settle- 
ments up  the  river,  Kentucky  and  Tennessee  alone  sending  over 
$1,600,000  of  produce  through  the  port.  Out  of  267  vessels 
clearing  from  New  Orleans  in  the  year  1802  there  were  158 
American  as  against  104  Spanish.  Seagoing  ships  had  even 
begun  to  be  built  at  Pittsburgh  and  had  successfully  made 
the  trip  from  the  upper  Ohio  to  Liverpool.  The  attachment  of 
the  Western  states  to  the  Union  depended  on  the  guarantee 
of  their  commerce,  and  this  guarantee  depended  on  the  control 
of  the  Mississippi.  If  the  river  was  not  in  our  hands,  at  least 
it  must  be  in  the  hands  of  a  power  with  whom  we  could  deal 
on  equal  terms.  Jefferson  recognized  this  when  he  declared 
that  New  Orleans  was  the  one  point  on  the  American  continent 
whose  possession  was  of  vital  importance  to  the  United  States 
and  wrote  to  our  minister  in  Paris  that  the  moment  France 
should  take  possession  of  the  port  "we  must  marry  ourselves 
to  the  British  fleet  and  nation." 

While  we  were  anxiously  awaiting  developments  in  Louisiana, 
and  Napoleon,  now  firmly  fixed  on  the  throne  of  France  and 
for  the  first  and  only  moment  of  his  meteoric  career  at  peace 
with  all  the  nations  of  Europe,  was  preparing  to  launch  his 
colonial  enterprise  in  earnest,  an  event  occurred  which  made 
decided  action  on  our  part  necessary.  On  October  16,  1802, 
acting  on  orders  from  Madrid,  Morales,  the  Spanish  intendant 
at  New  Orleans,  withdrew  the  right  of  deposit  granted  in  the 
treaty  of  1795  and  thus  closed  the  Mississippi  to  a  trade  that 
already  amounted  to  40  per  cent  of  our  exports.  Whether  or 
not  this  hostile  decree  was  promulgated  at  the  behest  of  Napo- 
leon, coming  as  it  did  on  the  eve  of  his  preparation  to  take 
possession  of  Louisiana,  it  was  a  sinister  evidence  of  the  amount 
of  consideration  that  our  river  trade  might  expect  from  the 
despot  of  France.  It  was  clear  that  we  must  make  every  effort 
to  get  possession  of  the  island  of  New  Orleans.  Jefferson  asked 
Congress  for  $2,000,000  to  be  used  at  the  discretion  of  the 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  215 

executive  for  negotiations  with  Napoleon.  He  nominated  James 
Monroe  as  envoy  extraordinary  to  act  with  our  ministers, 
Robert  R.  Livingston  at  Paris  and  Charles  Pinckney  at  Madrid, 
in  securing  the  interests  of  the  United  States  in  Louisiana.1 
Monroe's  instructions  were  vague,  hardly  more  than  an  expres- 
sion of  unlimited  confidence  in  his  discretion;  but  in  letters 
both  to  him  and  to  Livingston  Jefferson  emphasized  the  tre- 
mendous importance  of  the  mission:  "The  future  destinies  of 
our  country  hang  upon  the  event  of  this  negotiation,"  he 
wrote.  Monroe  sailed  for  France  in  the  middle  of  January, 
1803,  while  the  Federalists  in  Congress  were  trying  to  embar- 
rass Jefferson  and  outbid  the  administration  in  popularity  with 
the  Western  settlers  by  advocating  the  immediate  seizure  of 
Louisiana  by  force. 

But  relief  in  the  tense  situation  came  neither  from  Living- 
ston's entreaties  nor  from  Monroe's  inducements,  but  from 
Napoleon  himself.  The  peace  of  Amiens  with  England  was 
wearing  thin.  The  destiny  of  the  First  Consul  was  war  and 
not  peace.  "My  fate  is  to  be  ever  in  arms,"  he  said  to  the 
Austrian  minister  Metternich.  The  prospect  of  building  a  dis- 
tant colonial  empire  suddenly  lost  its  charms.  The  advance 
guard  of  12,000  soldiers  whom  he  had  sent  under  his  brother- 
in-law,  General  Leclerc,  for  the  conquest  of  Santo  Domingo 
had  succumbed  to  the  attack  of  Toussaint  L'Ouverture's  ne- 
groes and  to  the  deadlier  attack  of  the  yellow  fever.  Napo- 
leon abandoned  the  Louisiana  project  as  abruptly  as  he  had 
conceived  it.  On  the  very  day  that  Monroe  landed  at  Havre 
the  First  Consul  ordered  his  minister  of  finance,  Barbe-Marbois, 
to  offer  Livingston  not  New  Orleans  alone  but  the  entire  prov- 
ince of  Louisiana  for  50,000,000  francs.  Livingston,  who  had 
been  trying  in  vain  to  persuade  Napoleon  to  sell  a  part  of 


1Even  Jefferson  was  cured  of  any  idea  of  French  sympathy  for  us  when 
Napoleon,  in  the  summer  of  1802,  assumed  the  robe  of  monarchy  under  the  title 
of  Consul  for  life  and  began  to  abolish  all  signs  of  republicanism.  Jefferson 
wrote  to  Livingston  in  October,  "We  stand  completely  corrected  of  the  error 
that  either  the  government  or  the  nation  of  France  has  any  remains  of  friend- 
ship for  us." 


216  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Louisiana,  was  dumfounded  by  this  offer  of  the  whole.1  He 
and  Monroe  discussed  the  matter  with  Marbois  (who  set  the 
price  at  100,000,000  francs  instead  of  50,000,000  as  he  had 
been  ordered),  and  after  some  haggling  they  agreed  on  the 
figure  of  60,000,000,  together  with  the  assumption  of  claims 
by  the  United  States  to  an  amount  not  exceeding  20,000,000 
francs,  making  the  total  price  80,000,000  francs,  or  some 
$14,500,000.  The  three  negotiators  set  their  names  to  the 
treaty  on  May  2,  i8o3,2  and  as  they  rose  to  shake  hands  Living- 
ston remarked:  "We  have  lived  long,  but  this  is  the  noblest 
work  of  our  whole  lives.  From  this  day  the  United  States  take 
their  place  among  the  powers  of  the  first  rank." 

When  the  Louisiana  treaty  reached  Washington  in  mid- 
summer, it  was  Jefferson's  turn  to  be  surprised.  He  had  sent 
Monroe  to  purchase  New  Orleans,  with  West  Florida  if  pos- 
sible, for  not  more  than  $10,000,000.  Now  came  a  bill  half 
again  as  large  for  the  whole  of  Louisiana — a  tract  which 
doubled  the  area  of  the  United  States.  There  was  no  doubt 
that  it  was  an  excellent  bargain ;  but  aside  from  the  charge  im- 
posed on  the  government  (a  charge  exceeding  our  total  annual 
revenue),  there  were  points  in  the  treaty  to  give  an  advocate 
of  strict  construction  much  uneasiness.  There  was  no  provi- 
sion of  the  Constitution  authorizing  the  executive  to  purchase 
foreign  territory  and  to  covenant  that  the  inhabitants  of  such 
territory  should  be  brought  into  the  Union  and  admitted  to 
the  enjoyment  of  all  the  rights  of  American  citizens.  Jefferson 
himself  was  the  first  to  admit  that  he  had  "done  an  act  beyond 
the  Constitution."  He  prepared  an  amendment  to  submit  to 

aThe  astute  Talleyrand,  who  for  some  reason  had  not  been  intrusted  by 
Napoleon  with  the  negotiations  for  the  sale  of  Louisiana,  nevertheless  knew  of 
the  First  Consul's  intention  and  in  a  private  capacity  anticipated  Marbois  in 
asking  Livingston  (before  Monroe's  arrival  in  Paris)  how  much  the  United 
States  would  give  for  the  whole  of  Louisiana.  Jefferson  apparently  had  little 
hope  that  Napoleon  would  part  with  any  of  Louisiana.  It  is  a  queer  coinci- 
dence that  on  the  very  day  on  which  the  treaty  of  cession  was  dated  (April  30, 
1803)  he  wrote  to  John  Bacon  that  he  was  "not  sanguine  in  obtaining  a  cession 
of  New  Orleans  for  money." 

2  The  treaty  was  dated  back  to  April  30,  1803. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  217 

Congress,  so  that  the  states  might  ratify  the  purchase  through 
their  legislatures  or  conventions.  But  before  the  meeting  of 
Congress,  Monroe  advised  him  from  Paris  that  Napoleon  might 
change  his  mind  if  there  were  any  delay  in  the  ratification  of 
the  treaty  and  the  appropriation  of  the  purchase  money  by 
Congress.  So,  comforted  by  the  assurances  of  his  friend 
Nicholas  that  the  treaty-making  power  of  the  executive  and 
the  Senate  was  unlimited  and  that  new  states  could  be  admitted 
out  of  newly  acquired  territory  as  well  as  out  of  the  existing 
territory  of  the  United  States,  Jefferson  cast  the  proposed 
amendment  behind  him,  asking  Congress  at  the  same  time  to 
cast  "metaphysical  subtleties"  behind  them  and  to  support 
him  in  his  actiqn  as  they  would  support  a  guardian  who  had 
acted  beyond  his  authority  for  the  good  of  his  ward.  The 
author  of  the  Kentucky  Resolutions  appealed  to  the  good  sense 
of  the  nation,  and  the  nation  was  with  him.  The  Federalist 
minority  in  Congress  objected  to  the  treaty  from  every  point 
of  view :  it  contravened  the  Constitution  by  giving  the  port  of 
New  Orleans  advantages  not  shared  by  other  ports  of  the 
country ;  it  usurped  the  power  of  Congress  by  regulating  trade ; 
'  the  payment  of  so  large  a  sum  of  money  to  a  belligerent  nation 
was  virtually  a  breach  of  neutrality ;  the  title  of  France  to  the 
province  of  Louisiana  was  not  clear ;  and  all  that  we  had  bought 
at  this  huge  price  was  "the  authority  to  make  war  on  Spain." 
But  opposition  was  unavailing.  The  Senate  immediately  rati- 
fied the  treaty  by  a  vote  of  24  to  7,  and  a  few  weeks  later  the 
House  voted  the  funds  in  the  form  of  an  issue  of  $11,250,000 
in  6  per  cent  stock  (89  to  23).  There  was  no  doubt  of  the 
popularity  of  the  Louisiana  Purchase. 

There  were  grave  irregularities  in  the  transaction.  Napoleon 
had  not  yet  fulfilled  his  part  of  the  Treaty  of  San  Ildefonso 
with  Spain  when  he  sold  us  Louisiana,  and  the  Spanish  authori- 
ties were  still  in  command  at  New  Orleans.  Moreover,  Napoleon 
had  promised  Spain  never  to  transfer  the  province  to  a  foreign 
power,  and  the  French  Constitution  forbade  the  First  Consul 
to  alienate  any  of  the  land  of  the  Republic.  In  short,  in  buying 
Louisiana  from  Napoleon  we  were,  as  Professor  Channing  says, 


2i8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

acting  as  "the  accomplices  of  the  greatest  highwayman  of  the 
age."  But  we  took  the  ground  that  the  delinquencies  of  France 
toward  Spain  could  not  invalidate  the  good  faith  of  our  dealing 
with  France;  and  Spain,  after  a  first  violent  protest,  acqui- 
esced in  the  transaction — with  her  own  interpretation  of  the 
boundaries  of  Louisiana. 

These  boundaries,  even  in  the  limited  form  finally  fixed  by 
the  treaty  of  1819  with  Spain,  inclosed  a  magnificent  domain 
extending  from  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  to  the  Canadian  border  and 
from  the  Mississippi  to  the  Rockies.  Fourteen  states  or  parts 
of  states  have  been  made  from  that  domain,  in  which  the  value 
of  the  farm  lands  alone  a  century  after  the  purchase  was  more 
than  a  thousand  times  as  great  as  the  price  paid  for  the  whole 
province.  The  white  inhabitants  of  this  domain  increased  from 
50,000  in  1804  to  20,000,000  in  1914.  In  abundance  and 
variety  of  products  it  is  the  richest  developed  area  in  the  world. 
And  the  original  cost  of  its  875,000  square  miles  was  about 
three  cents  an  acre!1  On  November  30,  1803,  Louisiana  was 
finally  handed  over  to  the  French  intendant  Laussat  by  the 
Spanish  authorities  at  New  Orleans,  and  twenty  days  later  the 
French  tricolor  was  hauled  down  and  the  Stars  and  Stripes 
were  raised  in  its  place. 

If  the  Constitution  was  strained  in  the  purchase  of  Louisiana, 
the  Declaration  of  Independence  was  violated  in  its  govern- 
ment. By  a  law  of  March  26,  1804,  Congress  separated  the 
more  densely  populated  part  of  the  province,  south  of  latitude 
33°,  as  the  territory  of  Orleans  and  handed  over  its  admin- 
istration completely  to  President  Jefferson.  He  was  to  appoint 
the  governor,  the  legislative  council,  and  the  judges.  He  simply 

*It  is  interesting  to  compare  this  with  the  price  paid  for  other  portions  of 
our  public  domain.  The  Mexican  cession  cost  4^  cents  an  acre  and  Florida 
17  cents  an  acre — both  in  addition  to  the  expense  of  wars.  We  paid  Texas 
26  cents  an  acre  for  the  land  surrendered  to  the  United  States  in  1850,  and 
three  years  later  we  gave  Mexico  34  cents  an  acre  for  the  Gadsden  Purchase. 
Altogether,  the  average  cost  of  our  public  lands  (including  surveys  and  the 
extinction  of  Indian  titles)  has  been  17^  cents  an  acre,  and  we  have  sold  them 
(exclusive  of  millions  of  acres  given  to  railroads,  educational  institutions,  and 
homesteaders)  at  prices  ranging  from  66|  cents  to  $5  an  acre. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  219 

"stepped  into  the  place  of  King  Charles  of  Spain"  as  the 
absolute  ruler  of  the  province?  Such  principles  as  government 
by  the  consent  of  the  governed,  popular  control  over  officials, 
trial  by  jury,  no  taxation  without  representation,  were  ignored. 
Edward  Livingston,  a  younger  brother  of  the  minister  at  Paris, 
had  moved  to  the  province  immediately  after  the  purchase,  to 
engage  in  the  practice  of  law.  He  wrote  a  petition  for  the 
"planters,  merchants,  and  other  inhabitants  of  Louisiana," 
protesting  against  the  law  of  March  26,  and  demanding  "the 
rights  and  privileges  of  American  citizens"  promised  in  the 
treaty.  "Were  the  patriots  who  composed  your  councils  [in 
the  days  of  the  Revolution]  mistaken  in  their  political  prin- 
ciples?" he  pertinently  asks.  "Do  political  axioms  on  the 
Atlantic  become  problems  when  transferred  to  the  shores  of  the 
Mississippi  ?  .  .  .  Many  of  us  are  native  citizens  of  the  United 
States.  .  .  .  For  our  love  of  order  and  submission  to  the  laws 
we  can  confidently  appeal  to  the  whole  history  of  our  settle- 
ment. .  .  .  Annexed  to  your  country  by  political  events,  it 
depends  on  you  to  determine  whether  we  shall  pay  the  cold 
homage  of  reluctant  subjects  or  render  the  free  allegiance  of 
citizens."  Livingston's  petition  induced  Congress  to  amend  the 
law  by  empowering  the  governor  of  the  territory  to  convene  a 
legislative  assembly  of  twenty-five  members  and  allowing  the 
territory  to  send  a  delegate  to  Congress.  It  was  not,  however, 
until  the  admission  of  the  territory  of  Orleans  into  the  Union 
as  the  state  of  Louisiana  in  1812  that  its  inhabitants  received 
the  full  rights  and  immunities  of  American  citizens  which  had 
been  promised  to  them  in  the  treaty. 

The  Louisiana  Purchase  gave  rise  to  a  boundary  dispute 
which  was  settled  by  the  diplomatists  in  1819,  but  which  has  not 
yet  ceased  to  be  a  subject  for  controversy  among  the  historians. 
We  took  Louisiana  from  France  "with  the  same  extent  that  it 
now  has  in  the  hands  of  Spain,  and  that  it  had  when  France 
possessed  it,  and  such  as  it  should  be  after  the  treaties  subse- 
quently entered  into  between  Spain  and  the  other  states."  But 
this  was  anything  but  clear.  "When  France  possessed  it"  (that 
is,  down  to  1763)  Louisiana  included  West  Florida  eastward 


220  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

to  the  Perdido  River,  but  all  of  Florida  had  been  ceded  to  Eng- 
land by  the  treaty  of  1763  and  had  remained  English  for  twenty 
years.  When  Spain  got  it  back,  therefore,  by  the  treaty  of 
1783,  it  was  from  England  and  not  from  France  that  she  re- 
ceived it.  It  hardly  seems,  therefore,  that  West  Florida  could 
have  been  fairly  comprised  in  the  Louisiana  "retroceded"  by 
Spain  to  France  in  1800.  Moreover,  neither  Napoleon  who 
sold,  nor  Monroe  and  Livingston  who  bought,  Louisiana  believed 
that  it  included  Florida.  Napoleon  was  still  trying  in  1802  to 
persuade  King  Charles  IV  to  add  the  Floridas  to  the  bargain  of 
San  Ildefonso,  and  Monroe  was  on  the  point  of  starting  for 
Madrid  after  the  purchase  of  1803  to  buy  the  Floridas  from 
Spain  for  an  additional  million  or  two,  when  the  French  court 
dissuaded  him.  On  the  other  hand,  the  French  authorities 
claimed  that  the  whole  of  Texas  was  included  in  Louisiana. 
General  Victor,  who  was  preparing  to  sail  from  Dunkirk  in  the 
spring  of  1803,  was  instructed  to  take  possession  as  far  west  and 
south  as  the  Rio  Grande,  and  Talleyrand  wrote  to  the  minister 
of  the  marine  that  "the  Rio  Bravo  [Rio  Grande]  from  its  mouth 
to  the  3oth  degree"  was  the  "line  of  demarkation."  Laussat,  the 
French  intendant  at  New  Orleans,  wrote  explicitly  to  Madison 
that  Louisiana  "did  not  comprehend  any  part  of  West  Florida," 
but  that  it  extended  "westwardly  to  the  Rio  Bravo,  otherwise 
called  the  Rio  del  Norte."  In  spite  of  all  this  testimony,  Jef- 
ferson was  bound  to  have  West  Florida.  He  persuaded  himself 
by  researches  in  the  history  of  Louisiana  during  the  summer  of 
1803  at  Monticello  that  West  Florida  was  rightly  ours,  and  the 
next  year  he  got  Congress,  in  spite  of  angry  protests  from  the 
Spanish  minister  at  Washington,  to  erect  the  shores  and  waters 
of  Mobile  Bay  into  a  United  States  customs  district.  To  the 
end  of  his  administration  he  was  laboring  with  Napoleon  to 
bring  pressure  to  bear  on  Spain  to  recognize  the  "rightful 
boundaries"  of  Louisiana. 

Besides  doubling  the  area  of  our  country  by  an  immensely 
valuable  domain  and  giving  rise  to  many  important  political 
and  diplomatic  questions,  the  Louisiana  Purchase  had  the 
further  effect  of  stimulating  our  interest  in  the  great  Western 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  221 

wilderness  which  stretched  two  thousand  miles  from  the  Mis- 
sissippi to  the  Pacific  coast.  Jefferson  was,  as  we  have  seen,  an 
enthusiastic  advocate  of  expansion.  In  1783  he  had  suggested 
to  George  Rogers  Clark,  the  hero  of  Vincennes,  that  he  form  a 
party  "to  explore  the  country  from  the  Mississippi  to  Califor- 
nia." Now,  twenty  years  later,  he  asked  Congress  for  an  appro- 
priation of  $2500  "to  send  intelligent  officers  with  ten  or  twelve 
men  to  explore  even  to  the  western  ocean"  and  to  study  the 
Indian  tribes,  the  botany,  geology,  and  zoology  of  the  country. 
To  be  sure,  the  expedition  would  pass  through  territory  belong- 
ing to  the  king  of  Spain,  but  it  might  be  represented  as  "a 
literary  pursuit"  ( ! )  and  would-  give  no  offense  on  account  of 
"the  expiring  state  of  the  Spanish  interests  there."  The  appro- 
priation was  made,  and  Jefferson  selected  his  private  secretary, 
Meriwether  Lewis,  to  lead  the  expedition,  with  William  Clark, 
the  younger  brother  of  George  Rogers  Clark,  for  his  lieutenant. 
Before  the  expedition  started,  in  the  spring  of  1804,  from  the 
mouth  of  the  Missouri  River,  Louisiana  had  become  our  prop- 
erty ;  but  the  land  beyond  the  Rockies  still  belonged  to  Spain 
up  to  the  forty-second  parallel  of  latitude,  and  north  of  that 
was  claimed  by  both  England  and  the  United  States.  The  Lewis 
and  Clark  expedition,  as  described  in  the  diaries  of  several  of 
the  men  who  participated  in  it,  is  one  of  the  most  fascinating 
chapters  of  our  early  history.  The  company  ascended  the 
Missouri  River  to  its  source,  then,  crossing  the  "great  divide," 
struck  the  upper  waters  of  the  Columbia  River  and  reached  the 
"roaring  ocean"  in  the  summer  of  1805.  Wintering  at  the 
mouth  of  the  Columbia,  they  returned  by  practically  the  same 
route  as  they  had  gone  out,  and  reached  St.  Louis  in  September, 
1806.  The  expedition  established  our  best  claim  to  the  Oregon 
region  in  our  later  dispute  with  England.1 

aOur  earlier  claim  to  the  region  was  based  on  the  discovery  of  the  Columbia 
River  by  Captain  Gray  in  1792.  While  Lewis  and  Clark  were  on  their  travels 
Captain  Zebulon  Pike,  seeking  the  sources  of  the  Mississippi,  explored  to  a  point 
several  miles  above  the  Falls  of  St.  Anthony,  when  he  was  hindered  by  deep 
snows.  The  following  year  he  explored  the  Southwest  from  the  Arkansas  River 
to  the  Spanish  settlements  on  the  Rio  Grande,  Pikes  Peak  in  Colorado  is 
his  monument. 


222  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Meanwhile  Jefferson  had  been  triumphantly  reflected  over 
his  Federalist  opponent  C.  C.  Pinckney.  The  irreconcilable 
Federalists  of  New  England,  led  by  Pickering,  Griswold,  and 
Sedgwick,  were  ready,  in  their  opposition  to  the  "lordlings  of 
the  South,"  to  break  up  the  Union.  The  addition  of  Louisiana, 
with  the  promise  of  incorporation  into  the  Union,  meant  the 
end  of  New  England's  aristocratic  leadership  in  Congress 
and  eventual  domination  by  the  Southern  planters,  supported 
by  "creoles  and  half  breeds"  from  the  "  western  Scythia."  Burr 
was  sounded  with  the  purpose  of  bringing  New  York  into 
a  projected  Western  confederacy,  and  the  unprincipled  Vice 
President,  whom  Jefferson  had  refused  to  honor  in  the  distribu- 
tion of  the  patronage,  joined  the  plot  and  accepted  Federalist 
support  in  his  candidacy  for  the  governorship  of  New  York  in 
the  spring  of  1804.  But  Burr  was  defeated  in  1804,  as  he  had 
been  in  1801,  by  the  efforts  of  Alexander  Hamilton.  Repub- 
lican electors  were  chosen  in  every  state  of  the  Union  except 
Connecticut  and  Delaware,  and  the  Jeffersonian  policies  were  in- 
dorsed by  an  electoral  majority  of  162  votes  to  14.  The  only 
result  of  the  Federalist  plot  of  disunion  was  the  loss  of  their  most 
distinguished  leader,  Alexander  Hamilton,  whom  Burr  slew  in 
revenge  in  a  duel  on  Weehawken  Heights  (July  n,  1804). 

The  first  administration  of  Thomas  Jefferson  was  successful 
in  every  respect.  Our  foreign  commerce  grew  so  rapidly  that 
Gallatin's  estimates  of  customs  receipts  were  far  outstripped. 
Except  for  what  Jefferson  called  "bickerings  with  Spain,"  our 
relations  with  foreign  countries  were  satisfactory.  The  great 
Louisiana  bargain  seemed  to  have  cemented  a  lasting  friend- 
ship with  France.  The  commissioners  under  the  Jay  Treaty 
satisfied  the  British  merchants  by  awarding  them  $2,664,000 
in  payment  of  the  long-standing  debts  from  American  citizens. 
The  English  government  was  so  well  pleased  to  see  Napoleon's 
colonial  design  defeated  in  the  western  continent  that  they 
allowed  Baring  Brothers  to  advance  cash  on  the  Louisiana  stock 
voted  by  Congress.  Our  Western  country  was  beginning  to 
fill  up.  Nearly  10,000  emigrants  had  gone  into  the  new  Missis- 
sippi Territory  established  in  1798.  Ohio,  with  a  population 


THE  JEFFERSON! AN  POLICIES  223 

of  55,000,  was  admitted  to  the  Union  as  the  seventeenth 
state  in  November,  1802.  In  January,  1805,  the  territory  of 
Michigan  was  set  off  from  the  Indian  Territory. 

By  an  act  of  March  10,  1800,  Congress  had  established  land 
offices  on  the  Ohio  frontier  for  the  sale  of  public  lands  in  small 
parcels  to  the  emigrant  at  two  dollars  an  acre  with  liberal 
credit — a  sure  sign  that  the  small  farmer  was  beginning  to  re- 
place the  hunter,  the  ranger,  and  the  speculator  on  our  frontier. 
Emigrants  already  began  to  swarm  on  the  main  routes  to  the 
Western  country — across  the  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut 
Berkshires,  up  the  Mohawk  valley  to  the  frontier  trading-post  at 
Buffalo,  through  the  Wyoming  valley  of  Pennsylvania  to  Pitts- 
burgh and  thence  down  the  Ohio,  from  Baltimore  via  the 
Potomac  and  Braddock's  road  to  the  Monongahela,  from  Vir- 
ginia and  the  Carolinas  through  the  Cumberland  Gap  to  the 
rich  lands  of  Kentucky  and  Tennessee,  or  far  to  the  south,  past 
the  dwindling  hills  of  the  Appalachian  range,  into  the  fertile 
territory  finally  ceded  to  the  government  by  the  state  of  Georgia 
in  1802.  Although  we  had  little  as  yet  to  boast  of  in  arts  and 
letters,  the  democratic  revolution  was  preparing  the  stage  for 
a  distinctly  American  type  of  genius  as  compared  with  the 
Anglo-American  of  the  colonial  days.  Newspapers  were  multi- 
plying rapidly,  and,  although  our  people  were  still  so  interested 
in  politics  and  so  vociferous  in  their  discussions  that  Salmagundi 
called  the  government  of  the  United  States  "a  logocracy,"  still 
the  scurrility  that  disgraced  our  press  in  the  days  of  Washington 
and  Adams  had  largely  disappeared.  The  New  York  Evening 
Post  and  the  National  Intelligencer  of  Washington  were  most 
respectable  substitutes  for  Freneau's  and  Fenno's  Gazettes. 
Peace,  prosperity,  political  harmony,  and  unbounded  prospects 
of  expansion  in  wealth  and  numbers  were  the  happy  auguries 
for  our  country  when  Jefferson  took  the  oath  of  office  for  the 
second  time,  on  March  4,  1805.  He  could  trulY  congratulate  his 
fellow  countrymen  that  "not  a  cloud  appeared  on  the  horizon." 


224  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  NEUTRALITY 

John  Randolph  of  Roanoke,  with  his  inimitable  gift  for 
epigram,  once  likened  the  four  years  of  Jefferson's  second 
administration  to  the  seven  lean  kine  in  Pharaoh's  dream,  which 
rose  from  the  river  and  devoured  their  seven  fat  predecessors. 
The  simile  was  apt.  From  the  spring  day  of  1805  when  Jefferson 
delivered  his  second  inaugural  address  congratulating  the  coun- 
try and  his  party  on  the  blessings  of  prosperity,  troubles  began 
to  brew :  schism  in  the  ranks  of  the  Republicans,  conspiracies  in 
the  West,  and  the  massing  of  new  war  clouds  in  Europe,  which 
spread  their  sinister  shadow  westward  across  the  ocean  until 
they  reached  our  shores.  The  President  believed  in  1805  that 
the  storms  which  marked  his  first  accession  to  office  were  all 
past.  He  wrote  to  General  Heath  in  December  in  a  strain  of 
rejoicing:  "The  new  century  opened  itself  by  committing  us 
on  a  boisterous  ocean,  but  all  is  now  subsiding.  Peace  is 
smoothing  our  path  at  home  and  abroad."  Four  years  later 
he  left  office,  his  cherished  policy  of  peaceful  coercion  defeated, 
his  hold  on  Congress  lost,  his  party  disrupted,  and  his  country 
on  the  verge  of  war,  comforting  himself  with  the  gloomy  solace 
that  "it  would  rarely  fall  to  the  lot  of  imperfect  man  to  retire 
from  this  station  [the  presidency]  with  the  reputation  and 
favor  which  bring  him  into  it." 

Quarrels  among  the  Republicans  of  New  York  and  Pennsyl- 
vania had  begun  to  appear  during  Jefferson's  first  term.  The 
Livingston  and  Clinton  factions  were  always  in  rivalry  for  the 
control  of  local  offices  and  policy ;  and  Vice  President  Burr  had 
become  so  far  alienated  from  the  administration,  through  having 
been  denied  what  he  considered  a  proper  share  of  the  patronage, 
that  he  had  lent  himself,  as  we  have  seen,  to  the  disunion  schemes 
of  the  New  England  Federalists.  A  veritable  epidemic  of  im- 
peachment of  state  judges  in  Pennsylvania,  spread  by  the  perse- 
cuting zeal  of  William  Duane  of  the  Aurora,  threw  the  great 
Republican  state  of  the  North  into  a  frenzy  .of  factional  strife 
which  Jefferson  tried  in  vain  to  allay.  These  local  quarrels 
proved  but  the  prelude  to  schism  and  intrigue  in  the  national 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  225 

Congress,  which  shattered  the  harmonious  relations  between 
the  Executive  and  the  Houses  and  reduced  the  latter  to  pitiable 
weakness  at  just  the  moment  when  union  and  strength  were  nec- 
essary to  meet  the  encroachments  of  the  European  belligerents 
on  our  commerce. 

The  man  who  introduced  strife  into  Congress  was  John 
Randolph.  This  highly  gifted,  but  contentious  and  abusive, 
son  of  Virginia,  who  boasted  that  the  blood  of  Pocahontas  ran 
in  his  veins,  had  been  displeased  from  the  beginning  of  Jeffer- 
son's administration  with  the  consideration  shown  to  the  North- 
ern states.  Conciliation  was  no  part  of  his  political  creed.  The 
Republicans,  he  thought,  should  conduct  the  government  with 
as  complete  regard  to  the  interests  of  the  agricultural  South 
as  the  Federalists  had  for  the  commercial  North.  There  were 
enough  able  men  from  Virginia  and  the  Carolinas  to  advise 
the  President  without  his  needing  to  have  recourse  to  the 
Lincolns  and  Dearborns  and  Crowninshields  of  Massachusetts. 
Randolph  conducted  the  prosecution  in  the  impeachment  of 
Justice  Chase  at  Jefferson's  express  request,  and  when  Chase 
was  acquitted  by  a  Senate  in  which  sat  34  Republicans  and 
only  10  Federalists,  it  was  proof  enough  to  Randolph  that  he 
had  been  left  in  the  lurch  by  the  administration.  He  was 
through  serving  Thomas  Jefferson. 

Randolph's  opportunity  for  revenge  came  with  the  opening 
of  Congress  in  December,  1805.  Jefferson  had  two  or  three 
political  "hobbies"  on  which  he  insisted,  in  spite  of  opposition 
from  foes  and  advice  from  friends,  with  a  persistence  that  was 
strange  in  a  man  generally  so  shrewd  in  political  compromise 
and  patient  in  the  handling  of  expedients.  One  of  those  hobbies 
was  the  acquisition  of  West  Florida.  He  had  committed  himself 
to  the  doctrine  that  the  Perdido  River  was  the  eastern  boundary 
of  the  Louisiana  Purchase,  and  for  this  he  labored  against  the 
flat  refusal  of  Spain  to  surrender  West  Florida  and  the  cynical 
indifference  of  Napoleon  to  his  entreaties  to  make  Spain  sur- 
render it.  There  were  matters  of  far  more  importance  to  the 
United  States  than  the  possession  of  a  few  square  miles  between 
the  Iberville  and  the  Perdido,  yet  Jefferson  seemed  even  ready 


226  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

to  go  to  war  with  Spain  over  this  territory.  In  his  message  of 
December  2,  1805,  he  recommended  the  better  defense  of  our 
seaports,  the  reorganization  of  our  militia,  the  preparation  of 
our  troops  on  the  Mississippi  to  resist  Spanish  " aggressions," 
and  even  hinted  at  the  desirability  of  building  ships  of  the  line. 
Three  days  later  he  sent  a  confidential  message  to  Congress, 
suggesting  an  appropriation  for  the  purchase  of  Florida.  The 
public  message  was  intended  for  popular  consumption  at  home 
and  abroad — to  exhibit  the  executive  as  a  strong  defender  of 
American  rights  and  to  frighten  Spain  to  part  with  her  province. 
The  secret  message  contained  the  real  plan  for  getting  West 
Florida.  Jefferson  had  worked  this  same  ruse  three  years  earlier 
when,  under  the  threat  of  "  marrying  ourselves  to  the  British 
fleet  and  nation,"  he  had  secured  Louisiana  from  France  for  a 
price.  But  the  astute  President  overlooked  some  very  important 
differences  in  the  two  situations.  We  got  Louisiana  for  money 
in  1803  not  because  we  either  bullied  or  bribed  Napoleon,  but 
simply  because  Napoleon  himself  suddenly  determined  to  sell 
Louisiana.  The  real  offer  came  from  him  and  not  from  us.  But 
in  1805  King  Charles  had  no  desire  to  sell  West  Florida,  and 
Napoleon  had  no  disposition  to  compel  him  to  do  so.  In  fact, 
on  the  very  day  that  Jefferson  sent  his  menacing  message  to 
Congress,  Napoleon  won  the  tremendous  victory  of  Austerlitz 
against  the  combined  armies  of  Austria  and  Russia  and  entered 
on  that  course  of  conquest  of  the  continent  of  Europe  which 
left  him  little  interest  in  the  disposal  of  a  strip  of  land  along  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico.  From  the  year  1806  on,  while  Jefferson  and 
Madison  were  still  flattering  themselves  that  they  could  bring 
" pressure"  to  bear  on  Napoleon  by  diplomacy  or  the  threat  of 
commercial  discrimination  to  secure  us  the  "  rightful  bound- 
aries" of  Louisiana,  Napoleon  was  only  using  Florida  as  a  bait 
to  dangle  before  our  eyes  in  order  to  keep  us  from  looking  too 
favorably  on  his  great  rival  England. 

Randolph  had  been  a  party  to  the  game  of  threat-and-purchase 
in  1803,  DUt  n°w  he  threw  himself  into  violent  opposition. 
He  was  chairman  of  the  Ways  and  Means  Committee.  When 
Jefferson's  request  for  $2,000,000  to  buy  Florida  was  read  to 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  227 

the  House,  he  declared  that  he  would  have  no  part  in  delivering 
the  public  purse  "to  the  first  cutthroat  who  demanded  it."  The 
inconsistency  of  appropriating  money  to  buy  a  province  which 
we  insisted  that  we  had  bought  three  years  before  furnished  a 
fine  topic  for  his  sarcasm.  Although  he  had  no  more  intention 
of  proceeding  to  war  than  Jefferson,  he  adopted  the  belligerent 
tone  of  the  first  message  and  moved  that  troops  should  be  raised 
to  protect  our  southern  frontier.  Jefferson  had  to  choose  be- 
tween the  rupture  of  his  party  in  Congress  and  the  abandon- 
ment of  his  plan  to  purchase  West  Florida.  He  clung  to  his 
hobby  and  got  his  $2 ,000,000.  But  the  vote  in  the  House,  which 
was  composed  of  1 1 2  Republicans  and  2  7  Federalists,  showed  a 
majority  of  only  22  for  the  bill,  and  the  $2,000,000  remained 
still  untouched  when  Jefferson  went  out  of  office.  Randolph's 
faction — called  the  " Quids" — was  not  numerous.  The  Presi- 
dent affected  to  ignore  them,  once  calling  them  "3  or  4.  in 
number  and  all  tongue" ;  but,  for  all  that,  their  brilliant  leader 
was  a  thorn  in  the  side  of  the  administration.  The  habit  of 
opposition  grows  by  what  it  feeds  on.  It  was  enough  hence- 
forth for  any  measure  to  have  the  support  of  Thomas  Jefferson 
to  insure  its  opposition  by  John  Randolph. 

Randolph  had  his  hobby,  too.  The  word  "  Yazoo"  threw  him 
into  a  rage  like  King  Henry's  when  he  heard  the  name  of 
Mortimer.  The  state  of  Georgia  claimed  the  land  west  to  the 
Mississippi  River  under  its  colonial  charter.  In  1795  the  legis- 
lature of  Georgia  sold  50,000,000  acres  near  the  Mississippi  and 
Yazoo  Rivers  to  the  Yazoo  land  companies  at  an  average  price 
of  one  and  one-half  cents  an  acre.  It  was  a  corrupt  transaction 
by  a  corrupt  legislature  most  of  whose  members  were  in  the 
deal.  The  people  of  the  state  indignantly  turned  the  legislature 
out  at  the  next  election,  and  the  bills  of  sale  to  the  Yazoo  com- 
panies were  rescinded.  There  was  no  provision  made,  how- 
ever, for  the  innocent  purchasers  of  land  from  the  companies. 
Both  Adams  and  Jefferson  were  petitioned  to  secure  redress 
from  the  state  of  Georgia,  but  nothing  was  done  until  1802,  when 
the  state  surrendered  to  the  Union  its  Western  claims.  Then 
the  United  States  inherited  the  Yazoo  controversy.  Jefferson 


228  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

appointed  three  of  his  cabinet  members — Madison,  Gallatin, 
and  Lincoln — to  devise  an  adjustment,  and  they  recommended 
the  appropriation  of  5,000,000  acres  of  public  land  in  the  terri- 
tory of  Mississippi  to  satisfy  the  bona  fide  claims  of  the  pur- 
chasers from  the  Yazoo  companies.  Randolph  opposed  the 
measure  with  frantic  violence  every  time  that  it  came  up  in  the 
House.  There  was  no  epithet  in  his  choice  vocabulary  of  slander 
that  was  too  severe  for  a  "Yazoo  man."  The  innocent  and  the 
guilty  were  condemned  together.  A  blameless  purchaser  in 
Pennsylvania  or  New  England  was  an  accomplice  of  the  Yazoo 
speculator.  Year  after  year  Randolph  killed  the  bills  for  the 
relief  of  Yazoo  buyers,  even  after  the  Supreme  Court,  in 
the  decision  of  Fletcher  vs.  Peck  (1810),  had  pronounced  the 
Georgia  repealing  act  a  violation  of  contract  and  hence  null 
and  void.  It  was  only  when  Randolph  failed  to  be  returned 
from  his  congressional  district  in  the  election  of  I8I21  that  the 
settlement  of  the  Yazoo  claims  was  finally  pushed  through 
Congress. 

Another  figure  of  ill  omen  for  Jefferson's  second  term  ap- 
peared in  the  scene  of  March  i,  1805,  in  the  Senate  chamber. 
When  the  vote  was  announced  clearing  Justice  Chase  of  the 
impeachment  charges,  Aaron  Burr  rose  from  the  president's 
chair  and  with  a  smile  and  a  bow  conveyed  his  congratulations 
to  Jefferson's  intended  victim.  Three  days  later  Burr  left  the 
vice  presidency  to  engage  on  a  career  of  treasonable  adventure 
which  reads  more  like  the  romance  of  "Rupert  of  Hentzau" 
than  a  chapter  in  the  history  of  our  infant  West.  Burr's  politi- 
cal ambition  was  great,  and  it  was  frustrated  at  every  point. 
Intrigues  with  the  Federalists  in  1801  and  1804  had  ruined  him 
with  the  Republicans,  and  the  slaying  of  the  great  Federalist 
leader  had  made  him  an  object  of  hatred  not  only  to  the  follow- 
ers of  Hamilton  but  to  all  respectable  Americans.  He  was  a  man 
without  a  party  and  almost  a  man  without  a  country.  All  that 

aBy  a  kind  of  "poetic  justice"  it  was  Jefferson's  son-in-law,  John  Eppes,  who 
defeated  Randolph  in  this  election.  The  erratic  Virginian  was  absent  from  Wash- 
ington, however,  for  a  single  term  only.  He  was  returned  to  the  House  in  the 
election  of  1814  and  remained  there  fifteen  years  longer. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  229 

remained  to  him  was  his  restless  spirit  of  selfish  ambition.  He 
turned  to  the  West  to  build  up  his  fortunes  anew:  Just  what  he 
intended  to  do  in  the  Mississippi  Valley  we  do  not  know,  and  it 
is  probable  that  Burr  himself  did  not  know.  His  plans  shifted  as 
his  prospects  changed.  Some  historians  believe  that  he  plotted 
the  detachment  of  the  trans-Allegheny  country  from  the  Union, 
some  that  he  aimed  at  the  conquest  of  New  Orleans  as  a  capital 
for  a  great  Western  state  including  Louisiana  and  Texas,  some 
that  he  dreamed  of  invading  Spanish  territory  to  the  south  and 
setting  up  the  empire  of  a  new  Montezuma  in  Mexico.  How- 
ever these  grandiose  schemes  may  have  played  through  his 
mind,  one  thing  is  certain:  he  collected  men,  money,  and  arms 
beyond  the  mountains  for  use  either  against  the  United  States 
or  against  a  friendly  neighboring  power.  This  was  his  treason. 
Burr  knew  the  dissatisfaction  in  Louisiana  caused  by  the  act 
of  Congress  of  1804.  He  talked  with  the  delegates  who  brought 
Livingston's  protesting  petition  to  Washington  in  December 
and  was  confirmed  in  his  belief  that  Louisiana  was  ripe  for 
rebellion.  In  the  summer  of  1805  he  approached  the  British 
minister  Anthony  Merry  with  an  appeal  for  $500,000  and  a 
supporting  squadron  in  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  from  England,  in 
return  for  which  the  parts  of  the  new  empire  wrested  from  Spain 
were  to  be  opened  to  British  trade.  Failing  to  get  a  response 
from  England,  he  turned  to  Spain,  representing  to  her  minister 
at  Washington,  d'Yrujo,  the  great  advantage  of  creating  a 
strong  state  under  friendly  rule  between  Mexico  and  the  hostile 
republic  of  America.  He  got  $10,000  out  of  d'Yrujo  before 
that  gullible  gentleman  received  word  from  Spain  to  have 
nothing  to  do  with  his  schemes.  This  threw  Burr  entirely  on 
such  allies  as  he  could  find  in  the  West,  and  by  what  must  have 
been  rare  powers  of  persuasion  he  enlisted  the  sympathy  and 
support  of  various  persons — the  rich  Irishman  Blennerhassett 
in  his  island  "castle"  on  the  Ohio;  James  Wilkinson,  the 
double-dyed  traitor  in  command  of  the  United  States  troops  in 
Louisiana;  Andrew  Jackson,  major  general  of  the  militia  of 
Tennessee ;  Daniel  Clark,  a  wealthy  merchant  of  New  Orleans ; 
and  a  number  of  less  important  persons.  But  there  was  too 


230  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

much  talk  and  too  little  money  for  a  successful  conspiracy. 
When  Burr  was  finally  ready  to  start  down  the  Ohio  from 
Blennerhassett's  island,  in  December,  1806,  it  was  not  as  a 
conqueror  with  an  "army,"  as  he  had  boasted,  but  as  a  fugitive 
from  justice  with  sixty  or  eighty  followers  hastily  embarked  in 
a  few  boats. 

For  President  Jefferson  had  at  last  heeded  the  rumors  of 
conspiracy  which  had  been  coming  to  him  for  over  a  year,  and 
on  November  27,  1806,  issued  a  proclamation  for  the  arrest 
of  "sundry  persons"  who  were  "conspiring  to  set  on  foot 
a  military  enterprise  against  the  dominions  of  Spain."  Burr 
eluded  the  proclamation  and  kept  on  his  way  till  he  reached  the 
neighborhood  of  Natchez,  on  the  lower  Mississippi,  where  he 
learned  that  Wilkinson  had  betrayed  him.  Giving  up  his  case 
as  lost  and  sinking  his  arms  in  the  river,  he  surrendered  to  the 
governor  of  the  territory  of  Mississippi ;  then  broke  his  parole 
and,  disguised  as  a  woodman,  struck  across  the  territory  for 
the  Spanish  province  of  Florida.  He  was  seized  near  Fort 
Stodert  (Alabama)  and  sent  to  Richmond  for  trial  on  the 
charge  of  treason  in  levying  war  against  the  United  States. 

The  eyes  of  the  whole  country  were  fixed  on  Richmond  when 
the  trial  commenced  in  August,  1807.  Jefferson  was  eager  for 
Burr's  condemnation.  He  wrote  a  dozen  letters  to  George  Hay, 
the  prosecuting  attorney  of  the  district  of  Virginia,  spurring 
him  on  to  the  assault.  But  the  foes  of  Jefferson  were  in  the 
ascendant.  Chief  Justice  Marshall  presided  as  judge,  and  he 
delegated  as  foreman  of  the  jury  another  Virginian  even  more 
hostile  to  the  President;  namely,  John  Randolph  of  Roanoke. 
Marshall  instructed  the  jury  carefully  as  to  what  constituted 
the  "overt  act"  necessary  to  convict  a  person  of  treason,  and 
warned  them  against  admitting  "any  testimony  relative  to  the 
conduct  or  the  declarations  of  the  prisoner  elsewhere  and 
subsequent  to  the  transactions  on  Blennerhassett's  island," 
which  was  equivalent  to  an  instruction  to  bring  in  a  verdict  of 
"not  guilty."  For  there  was  no  evidence  to  show  that  the  men 
collected  on  the  island  were  there  for  the  purpose  of  levying 
war  on  the  United  States.  The  court  summoned  Jefferson  to 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  231 

appear  as  a  witness,  and  when  he  indignantly  refused  to  obey 
the  summons  as  inconsistent  with  the  dignity  of  his  office,  the 
lawyers  for  the  defense  proceeded  to  heckle  his  star  witness, 
General  Wilkinson,  until  it  seemed  as  though,  instead  of  Aaron 
Burr,  he  himself  were  on  trial  for  treason.  To  Jefferson's  great 
humiliation  and  disgust  the  prisoner  was  discharged.  The  polit- 
ical enemies  of  the  administration  had  triumphed,  and  the  re- 
venge of  John  Randolph  for  the  acquittal  of  Justice  Chase  was 
complete.  Freed  from  the  halter  which  he  richly  deserved,  Burr 
made  his  way  to  France,  where  he  soon  gave  further  proof  of 
his  treasonable  nature ; 1  and  a  few  years  later  he  returned  to 
New  York,  where  he  lived  in  obscure  indigence  until  his  death 
in  1836  at  the  age  of  eighty. 

While  the  Burr  trial  was  proceeding  at  Richmond,  an  event 
-  occurred  off  the  Virginia  coast  which  threw  the  country  into  a 
state  of  excitement  such  as  had  not  been  experienced  since  the 
shots  were  fired  on  Lexington  Green.  The  United  States  frigate 
Chesapeake,  Captain  Barron  commanding,  weighed  anchor 
from  Norfolk  in  the  early  evening  of  June  22,  bound  for  the 
Mediterranean  service.  Her  guns  were  still  unmounted,  and 
her  decks  were  littered  with  tackle.  The  British  ship  Leopard 
overhauled  her  outside  the  capes  and  sent  an  officer  aboard  her 
with  orders  from  Admiral  Berkeley,  commanding  the  British 
squadron  in  American  waters,  to  come  to  and  be  searched  for 
British  deserters  in  her  crew.  When  Barron  replied  that  he 
had  no  deserters  aboard,  the  Leopard  came  within  close  range 
and  poured  a  broadside  of  shot  into  the  Chesapeake,  killing  or 
wounding  twenty-one  men.  Barron,  unprepared  to  resist,  struck 
his  colors  after  firing  a  single  gun  lighted  by  a  coal  brought 
from  the  ship's  galley.  Then  the  British  officers  took  four 
alleged  deserters  off  the  American  frigate  and  left  her  to  crawl 

aln  1810,  when  Napoleon's  insults  to  our  shipping  reached  their  climax  in  the 
Rambouillet  Decree,  which  confiscated  all  American  vessels  that  had  entered 
French  ports  after  May  20,  1809,  Burr  addressed  a  memoire  to  Napoleon's 
minister  of  police,  Fouche,  declaring  that  "with  100,000  troops  and  a  combined 
attack  from  Canada  and  Louisiana,  the  destruction  of  the  United  States  was 
certain." 


232  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

back  to  Norfolk  with  her  rigging  torn  and  her  hull  riddled  by 
solid  shot.  To  understand  this  wanton  attack  on  an  American 
warship  by  a  nation  at  peace  with  us,  it  is  necessary  to 
review  briefly  the  course  of  foreign  affairs  since  Jefferson's 
second  inauguration. 

Our  relations  with  Great  Britain  during  the  decade  following 
Jay's  Treaty  were  satisfactory,  especially  as  the  French  revo- 
lutionary wars  died  down  with  the  close  of  the  century.  With 
the  advent  of  a  general  European  peace  in  1801  there  was 
promise  that  all  our  grievances  would  be  adjusted.  Rufus  King, 
our  able  minister  in  London,  not  only  negotiated  with  the 
friendly  Addington  ministry  the  settlement  of  the  debts  long 
claimed  by  British  merchants  but  also  reported  being  well 
on  the  way  to  the  adjustment  of  our  boundary  disputes  and  even 
of  the  vexed  question  of  the  impressment  of  American  sailors 
(1803).  But  Napoleon's  aggressions  in  the  neutral  republics 
of  the  Continent  (Italy,  Switzerland,  Holland),  whose  inde- 
pendence he  had  promised  to  respect,  brought  the  rupture  of 
the  Peace  of  Amiens  and  enkindled  the  war  which  was  to  last, 
uninterrupted  on  the  part  of  Great  Britain,  until  the  overthrow 
of  the  upstart  emperor  of  the  French  and  his  final  exile  to  the 
rock  of  St.  Helena.  The  renewal  of  the  war  by  England  led  to 
the  renewal  of  the  depredations  on  our  commerce  and  the  de- 
fiance of  our  rights  as  a  neutral  maritime  power.  Napoleon  was 
determined  to  starve  England  into  submission,  and  England, 
whose  very  existence  depended  on  the  control  of  the  seas,  was 
equally  determined  to  dictate  the  laws  of  maritime  commerce 
to  the  world.  The  severity  of  this  struggle  was  the  barometer 
which  marked  the  fortunes  of  the  American  marine. 

At  the  very  opening  of  Jefferson's  second  term  came  ominous 
signs  of  the  new  policy  of  England  toward  neutrals.  The  ton- 
nage of  American  vessels  engaged  in  foreign  trade  had  grown, 
thanks  to  the  constant  disturbances  in  Europe,  from  128,893  m 
1789  to  922,298  in  1805.  Our  imports  in  the  same  period  had 
increased  from  $20,000,000  to  $77,000,000,  and  our  exports  (a 
large  part  of  which  consisted  of  imports  from  the  West  Indies 
reexported  to  Europe)  from  $23,000,000  to  $80,000,000.  Nine 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  233 

tenths  of  this  extensive  American  commerce  was  carried  on  in 
American  ships.  The  English  merchants  viewed  the  enormous 
expansion  of  the  American  carry  ing- trade  with  jealous  alarm 
and  brought  pressure  to  bear  on  the  ministry  and  Parliament  to 
check  it.  Acts  of  Parliament  in  1804  and  1,805  opened  ports 
of  the  West  Indies  to  enemy  vessels  carrying  colonial  cargoes, 
and  allowed  even  importation  of  colonial  products  from 
the  Spanish  and  French  islands  into  England.  In  the  mid- 
summer of  1805  another  severe  blow  was  struck  at  the  neu- 
tral carrying-trade  by  the  decision  of  Sir  William  Grant,  Master 
of  the  Rolls,  in  the  Court  of  Appeals  in  Prize  Cases,  con- 
demning the  ship  Essex,  which  had  loaded  with  a  cargo  at 
Barcelona,  Spain,  landed  at  Salem  to  pay  duties,  and  then  pro- 
ceeded with  its  cargo  to  Havana,  Cuba.  Sir  William  maintained 
that  the  landing  and  payment  of  duties  in  America  did  not 
legalize  the  voyage,  because  the  cargo  was  never  intended  for 
American  markets.  The  final  destination  of  the  cargo  was  the 
only  thing  to  be  considered,  and  the  Essex  was  clearly  a  neutral 
ship  carrying  enemy  goods  to  an  enemy  port.  As  half  of  our 
export  trade  was  carried  on  in  these  "broken  voyages,"  now 
declared  illegal  by  the  highest  maritime  court  in  the  British 
Empire,  the  dismay  of  the  American  merchants  and  shipowners 
can  be  imagined.1  British  cruisers  seized  a  large  number  of 
American  merchantmen  as  prizes,  and  the  Admiralty  Courts 

1Sir  William's  decision  was  all  the  harder  to  bear  because  in  an  earlier  case, 
that  of  the  Polly  (1801),  Sir  William  Scott  of  the  Admiralty  Court  had  declared 
that  "landing  the  goods  and  paying  duties  in  a  neutral  country  broke  the 
continuity  of  the  voyage  and  thus  legalized  the  trade."  But  the  case  of  the 
Polly  cannot  be  pleaded  against  the  justice  of  the  Essex  decision  ;  nor  is  it 
true,  as  practically  every  American  historian  has  urged,  that  the  British  court 
"reversed"  itself  in  the  Essex  decision.  For  (i)  the  Court  of  Appeals  was  higher 
than  the  Admiralty  Court;  (2)  the  Polly  paid  the  duties  in  the  American 
port  in  good  faith,  while  almost  all  the  Essex's  duties  were  refunded  as  draw- 
backs; and  (3)  the  Prize  Court  in  1802  condemned  the  Mercury  for  "attempting 
to  carry  on  a  trade  between  Havana  and  Spain  by  way  of  Charleston."  The 
Americans  were  simply  taking  advantage  of  favorable  circumstances  to  maintain 
a  trade  which  was  contrary  to  the  British  Navigation  Acts  and  to  the. "Rule 
of  1756,"  which  forbade  neutrals  in  time  of  war  to  trade  with  ports  which 
were  closed  to  them  in  time  of  peace. 


234  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

condemned  their  cargoes.  Insurance  rates  on  American  ships 
jumped  to  high  figures,  and  protests  were  loud  in  our  commercial 
centers  against  the  arbitrary  invasion  of  our  neutral  rights. 

On  October  21,  1805,  Great  Britain  sealed  her  incontestable 
authority  over  the  control  of  the  jea.-borne  commerce  of  the 
world  by  Lord  Nelson's  destruction  of  the  combined  fleets  of 
France  and  Spain  off  Cape  Trafalgar.  A  few  weeks  later 
(December  2)  Napoleon  won  the  mastery  of  the  continent  of 
Europe  by  his  victory  over  the  allied  armies  of  Austria  and 
Russia  at  Austerlitz.  Henceforth  it  was  a  mighty  duel  between 
"the  tiger  and  the  shark."  Napoleon,  without  a  fleet,  still  har- 
assed British  commerce  by  privateers  and  sought,  by  seizures 
and  confiscations  in  French  and  allied  ports  in  Europe,  to 
frighten  neutrals  from  trading  with  the  British  Isles.  England, 
mistress  of  the  seas,  prescribed  the  terms  on  which  neutral  com- 
merce might  be  carried  on,  with  the  double  purpose  of  enriching 
the  British  merchants  and  monopolizing  the  colonial  trade. 

The  first  Congress  of  Jefferson's  second  term  met  on  the 
very  day  of  Napoleon's  victory  at  Austerlitz.  So  little  did  the 
President  divine  the  import  of  the  events  of  the  summer  and 
autumn  of  1805  that  he  looked  on  the  renewal  of  hostilities  be- 
tween England  and  France  as  a  favorable  omen  for  the  United 
States.  Still  harping  on  the  acquisition  of  West  Florida,  he 
thought  that  Napoleon's  "embarrassment"  with  his  continental 
war  made  the  fitting  moment  to  bring  pressure  to  bear  on  him  to 
force  Spain  to  deliver  the  province  (see  page  220).  Further- 
more, he  believed  that  our  preeminent  position  as  the  great 
neutral  commerce-carrier  of  the  world  was  so  indispensable  to 
both  Great  Britain  and  France  that  by  peaceful  coercion  we 
could  keep  both  the  belligerents  in  the  path  of  justice  to  America 
simply  by  manifesting  the  most  impartial  justice  to  them.  Our 
merchants  too,  while  not  sharing  the  President's  confidence  in 
the  contagion  of  good  intentions,  still  hoped  that  American  trade 
would  not  suffer  materially  through  the  restrictions  of  Napoleon 
or  Great  Britain.  They  were  indignant  over  the  seizures  made 
under  the  Essex  decision ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  the  risk  of 
seizure  forced  freight  rates  so  high,  and  the  price  of  American 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  235 

and  colonial  products  rose  so  rapidly,  that  the  merchant  made 
a  profit  if  only  one  in  three  of  his  swift  vessels  eluded  the 
British  cruisers  and  landed  her  cargo  safe  in  a  European  port. 
Harking  back  to  the  policy  of  1774,  Jefferson's  Congress  at- 
tempted to  hold  Great  Britain  to  the  path  of  justice  by  passing 
a  Nonintercourse  Act  in  April;  1806,  excluding  a  number  of 
important  articles  of  British  manufacture  from  our -ports  after 
the  fifteenth  of  the  following  November.  The  threat  had  no 
effect  on  England's  policy,  every  month  that  passed  in  the 
intensifying  struggle  between  Great  Britain  and  Napoleon 
showing  more  clearly  that  the  rights  of  neutrals  were  swallowed 
up  in  the  voracious  demand  for  victory. 

A  succession  of  Orders  in  Council  of  the  English  king  and 
Decrees  of  the  Emperor  Napoleon  in  the  years  1806  and  1807 
marked  the  course  of  the  struggle.  In  April,  1806,  just  at  the 
moment  when  our  Congress  was  passing  the  Nonintercourse 
Act,  the  British  prime  minister,  Charles  James  Fox,  announced 
a  blockade  of  the  coast,  rivers,  and  ports  of  northern  Europe 
from  the  mouth  of  the  Elbe  River  in  Germany  to  the  harbor  of 
Brest  at  the  western  extremity  of  Brittany — a  line  of  750  miles. 
Napoleon's  opportunity  for  revenge  came  six  months  later, 
when  he  crushed  the  German  army  at  Jena  and  entered  the 
Prussian  capital,  Berlin.  Thence  he  issued  his  famous  Berlin 
Decree  (November  21, 1806)  prohibiting  all  commerce  and  cor- 
respondence with  the  British  Isles,  declaring  every  subject  of 
England  found  within  the  lands  which  his  armies  occupied  a 
prisoner  of  war,  confiscating  all  property  of  English  subjects  in 
these  lands,  and  ordering  the  seizure  of  any  vessels  coming 
from  England  or  her  colonies  to  the  ports  under  his  control. 
This  outrageous  decree  shows  the  bitterness  of  the  struggle 
between  "-the  tiger  and  the  shark."  England  replied  in  1807 
(January  7  and  November  1 1 )  with  two  Orders  in  Council  for- 
bidding coastwise  trade  between  the  ports  in  the  power  of 
France  or  her  allies,  blockading  all  ports  in  Europe  from  which 
the  British  flag  was  excluded,  and  forcing  neutrals  to  trade  with 
Britain's  enemies  directly  through  British  ports,  paying  duties  on 
certain  "enumerated  articles"  (cotton,  sugar,  tobacco,  molasses, 


236  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

rice)  which  were  brought  to  England  for  reexportation.  Finally, 
Napoleon  answered  by  a  Decree  from  Milan  (December  17, 
1807)  declaring  all  ships  that  paid  a  tax  to  the  British  govern- 
ment or  allowed  themselves  to  be  searched  by  British  cruisers 
"denationalized"  and  "good  prize." 

These  Orders  and  Decrees,  if  strictly  enforced,  would  have 
ruined  our  commerce  with  Europe,  for  they  left  only  Russia, 
Sweden,  and  Turkey  open  to  our  ships.  Access  to  these  countries 
was  controlled  by  Great  Britain  through  the  narrow  ways  of  the 
English  Channel  and  the  Strait  of  Gibraltar.  But  the  Orders  and 
Decrees  could  not  in  the  nature  of  the  case  be  strictly  enforced. 
The  flags  of  all  the  maritime  nations  of  the  Continent  had  been 
driven  from  the  ocean,  leaving  America  and  England  as  virtu- 
ally the  only  carriers  of  commerce.  And  not  even  the  powerful 
navy  of  Great  Britain  was  able  to  keep  our  swift  merchant 
vessels  from  reaching  the  forbidden  ports  of  the  Continent, 
where  handsome  profits  awaited  their  successful  docking.  The 
figures  o!  our  foreign  commerce  for  the  year  1807,  when 
seizures  and  confiscations  were  most  abundant,  are  sufficient 
proof  of  this.  Our  exports  for  that  year  totaled  $108,000,000 
and  our  imports  $138,000,000,  being  the  largest  volume  of 
foreign  trade  in  our  history  until  1835.  The  customs  revenue 
from  our  trade  in  1806  was  $14,667,000,  or  three  times  that  of 
any  year  before  1800.  The  cargoes  of  American  merchantmen 
"filled  the  warehouses  at  Cadiz  and  Antwerp  to  overflowing; 
they  glutted  the  markets  of  Embden  and  Lisbon,  of  Hamburg 
and  Copenhagen,  with  the  produce  of  the  West  Indies  and  the 
fabrics  of  the  East,  and,  bringing  back  the  products  of  the  looms 
and  forges  of  Germany  to  the  new  world,  drove  out  the  manu- 
factures of  Yorkshire,  Manchester,  and  Birmingham."  The 
134  richly  laden  American  vessels  which  Napoleon  seized  by 
the  Rambouillet  Decree  (May  23,  1810)  show  how  little  able 
the  European  antagonists  were  to  ruin  our  commerce  by  proc- 
lamations. Indeed,  had  there  been  only  true  economic  griev- 
ance of  the  seizure  of  our  ships  and  the  confiscations  of  our 
cargoes  to  exasperate  us,  we  might  well  have  continued  to 
protest  and  profit  during  the  entire  war. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  237 

But  political  offenses  accompanied  the  economic  aggression. 
The  British  merchants  besieged  Parliament  to  use  every  weapon 
to  put  an  end  to  the  competition  of  our  neutral  commerce. 
Having  swept  the  navies  of  France  and  Spain  from  the  seas, 
the  British  could  not  allow  those  countries  still  to  receive  the 
products  of  their  colonies  in  American  bottoms.  The  British 
navy,  hard  pressed  for  men,  saw  their  sailors  deserting  to  the 
decks  of  American  merchantmen,  drawn  by  the  attractions 
of  higher  pay,  better  food,  and  milder  discipline.  Adopting 
the  principle  that  commerce  under  a  neutral  flag  was  "war  in 
disguise,"  England  redoubled  her  efforts  to  paralyze  our  ship- 
ping. Her  cruisers  hovered  off  the  coasts  from  Eastport  to  the 
St.  Marys  River,  often  coming  within  the  three-mile  limit  and 
even  within  the  capes  that  guarded  our  bays  and  rivers.  They 
stopped  our  vessels,  searched  our  crews,  and  carried  off  hun- 
dreds of  seamen  to  serve  on  British  men-of-war.  It  availed  a 
man  nothing  to  show  his  easily  procured  certificate  of  Ameri- 
can naturalization,  for  the  British  government  did  not  recog- 
nize the  right  of  one  of  its  citizens  to  transfer  his  allegiance 
to  another  country.  The  British  subjects  in  the  American 
colonies  were  naturally  absolved  from  their  allegiance  to  the 
crown  by  the  treaty  of  1783,  and  those  bona  fide  American 
citizens  the  impressment  officers  were  instructed  to  respect. 
But  the  officers  frequently  erred,  and  naturally  never  in  the 
direction  of  mistaking  a  British  subject  for  an  American 
citizen.  Just  how  many  American  citizens  were  impressed  be- 
fore we  went  to  war  with  Great  Britain  it  is  impossible  to  say. 
But  shortly  before  the  outbreak  of  the  war  President  Madison 
laid  before  Congress  a  very  detailed  report  on  the  subject,  show- 
ing 6057  cases  of  American  seamen  who  had  been  "  impressed 
and  held  in  bondage"  during  the  three  preceding  years.1 

1The  sufferings  of  the  impressed  sailors  appear  in  plaints  which  have  come 
down  to  us.  A  youth  named  Pindell,  held  on  board  the  British  ship  Bellona, 
writes  to  his  father  begging  for  release  and  saying  that  he  would  rather  "drown 
himself"  than  endure  his  present  condition.  A  veteran  of  the  Revolution,  David 
Rumsey,  whose  son  was  impressed  on  a  British  ship,  wrote  to  the  Speaker  of 
the  House,  "If  this  is  all  the  liberty  I  have  gained,  to  be  bereaved  of  my 
children  in  that  form  and  they  made  slaves,  I  had  rather  be  without  it." 


238  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  first  sinister  effect  on  American  politics  of  the  renewed 
struggle  in  Europe  appeared  at  the  close  of  the  year  1 806.  In  the 
summer  of  that  year  James  Monroe  and  William  Pinkney  had 
been  negotiating  with  the  friendly  Whig  ministry  of  Fox  a 
treaty  to  replace  the  Jay  Treaty  of  1795,  which  had  expired. 
Their  instructions  were  to  secure  the  abandonment  of  impress- 
ment, reparation  for  captures  made  under  the  Essex  ruling,  and 
a  restoration  of  our  West  Indian  trade  to  the  status  of  1801. 
They  had  so  far  modified  these  instructions  as  to  agree  to  a 
treaty  securing  the  reopening  of  the  trade,  when  the  news  of 
Napoleon's  Berlin  Decree  reached  London.  Then  the  British 
negotiators  announced  that  their  government  would  observe 
the  treaty  only  if  the  United  States  would  pledge  themselves  to 
resist  the  execution  of  the  Decree.  In  other  words,  we  were 
offered  a  meager  and  mutilated  treaty  with  Great  Britain 
virtually  on  the  condition  that  we  should  provoke  a  war  with 
Napoleon.  "How  Monroe  and  Pinkney  could  have  signed  the 
treaty  after  the  communication  of  this  note,"  says  Channing, 
"is  one  of  the  mysteries  of  American  history:  that  his  action 
did  not  put  an  end  to  James  Monroe's  political  career  is  equally 
hard  to  understand."  President  Jefferson  refused  even  to  lay 
the  treaty  before  the  Senate,  when  it  arrived  in  March,  1807, 
sending  back  word  to  the  commissioners  in  London  to  enter  on 
fresh  negotiations. 

But  long  before  this  mild  rebuke  reached  Monroe  and  Pink- 
ney all  hopes  of  better  terms  had  vanished.  In  April,  1807, 
the  general  elections  returned  a  majority  of  200  Tory  squires 
to  Parliament.  George  Canning,  brilliant,  overbearing,  sar- 
castic, opinionated,  and  implacable,  became  the  Secretary  of 
State  for  Foreign  Affairs.  The  press  of  England  soon  took  its 
tone  from  the  new  government.  America  was  denounced  as 
"an  insignificant  and  puny  power,"  which  must  not  be  allowed 
"to  mutilate  Britain's  proud  sovereignty  of  the  ocean."  Britan- 
nia ruled  the  waves,  and  there  should  be  no  neutrals!  "From 
the  moment  Mr.  Canning  and  his  party  assumed  power,"  says 
Henry  Adams,  "the  fate  of  Mr.  Jefferson's  administration  was 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  239 

sealed.  .  .  .  England  was  determined  to  recover  her  commerce 
and  take  back  her  seamen,  and  America  had  no  alternative  but 
submission  or  war,  .  .  .  equally  fatal  to  Mr.  Jefferson's  admin- 
istration. Canning  cared  little  which  course  she  took,  but  he 
believed  she  would  submit."  The  cabinet  was  already  planning 
the  Order  in  Council  which  was  to  close  most  of  the  ports  of 
Europe  to  American  trade. 

Such  was  the  unpromising  state  of  our  relations  with  England 
when  the  attack  on  the  Chesapeake  occurred,  on  the  same  day 
that  the  new  Tory  Parliament  met  at  Westminster.  War  seemed 
inevitable.  Even  from  New  England,  where  there  was  always 
the  most  ready  disposition  to  put  a  favorable  interpretation  on 
the  acts  of  the  British  ministry,  came  threatening  words.  John 
Quincy  Adams  believed  that  "  Downing  Street  had  decided  on 
hostilities."  Jefferson  issued  a  proclamation  excluding  British 
warships  from  the  waters  of  the  United  States,  and  began  to 
make  arrangements  for  the  disposition  of  gunboats  to  protect 
our  ports  and  to  call  out  militia  for  the  defense  of  the  Canadian 
border.  He  dispatched  the  armed  schooner  Revenge  to  England 
with  orders  to  Monroe  to  demand  an  apology  and  reparation  for 
the  attack  on  the  Chesapeake,  and  called  Congress  to  meet  on 
October  26,  when  time  had  been  given  for  passions  to  cool  and 
for  a  reply  to  be  received  from  Canning.  In  his  private  corre- 
spondence, which  was  often  a  vent  for  the  strong  feelings  which 
he  hesitated  to  express  in  his  public  writings,  the  President 
sounded  a  note  of  defiance  against  "  English  tyranny  bearing 
us  down  in  every  point  of  either  honor  or  interest."  He  was 
for  war  "unless  England  did  us  ample  justice  in  the  Chesa- 
peake affair,"  trusting  to  the  "chapter,  of  accidents"  for  what 
Napoleon  might  do  to  us.  His  fellow  Virginian  Nicholson  wrote 
to  Gallatin  that  forbearance  now  would  be  as  degrading  as 
unqualified  submission:  "But  one  feeling  pervades  the  nation. 
All  distinctions  of  Federalists  and  Republicans  have  vanished. 
The  people  are  ready  to  submit  to  any  deprivation,  and  if  we 
withdraw  within  our  own  shell  and  turn  loose  some  thousands  of 
privateers,  we  shall  obtain  in  a  little  time  an  absolute  renunci- 


240  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ation  of  the  right  of  search  for  the  purpose  of  impressment.1 
A  parley  will  prove  fatal.  ...  I  trust  in  God  that  the  Revenge 
is  going  out  to  bring  Monroe  and  Pinkney  home." 

Contrary  winds  kept  westward-bound  vessels  in  European 
ports,  and  it  was  not  until  long  after  Congress  had  met  and 
listened  to  a  rather  belligerent  message  from  the  President  that 
news  came  from  the  other  side.  Then,  toward  the  middle 
of  December,  a  fleet  of  ships  landed  in  rapid  succession  at 
New  York,  Norfolk,  and  Boston  bringing  a  batch  of  ill  news. 
Canning,  while  ready  to  discuss  the  Chesapeake  case,  haughtily 
refused  to  abate  one  jot  or  tittle  of  his  contention  as  to  the  right 
of  impressment.  Napoleon  had  begun  to  enforce  the  Berlin 
Decree  by  seizing  the  American  ship  Horizon,  driven  on  the 
French  coast  in  a  voyage  from  England.  A  new  British  Order 
in  Council  (November  n,  1807)  had  practically  closed  the 
European  continent  to  our  trade.  And  as  an  earnest  of  the  way 
in  which  Great  Britain  might  treat  weaker  nations  which  should 
show  deference  to  the  will  of  Napoleon,  British  warships  had 
laid  Copenhagen  in  ruins  and  carried  the  whole  Danish  fleet 
into  an  English  port  as  a  " hostage."  The  moment  had  come 
to  adopt  a  policy.  Submission  and  war  were  equally  distasteful 
to  Jefferson,  and,  fortified  by  his  persistent  belief  that  our  com- 
merce was  indispensable  to  both  belligerents,  he  recommended 
that  the  United  States  bring  them  to  terms  by  cutting  off  that 
commerce  altogether.  Every  member  of  his  cabinet  agreed  with 
him.  On  December  17,  1807,  he  sent  a  message  to  Congress 
urging  an  embargo  on  all  the  foreign  commerce  of  the  United 
States.  The  Senate  immediately  passed  the  bill  by  a  vote  of 
22  to  6,  and  four  days  later  the  House  concurred  by  a  vote  of 
82  to  44.  Most  of  the  state  legislatures  too  approved  the  em- 
bargo. In  January  Congress  appropriated  $1,000,000  for  the 
defenses  of  ports  and  harbors;  in  March  it  empowered  the 
President  to  call  on  100,000  militia  to  serve  six  months;  in 

alt  is  interesting  to  note  that  this  suggestion  of  withdrawing  our  merchant 
marine  from  trade  (the  embargo  policy)  was  made  six  months  before  Jefferson 
actually  set  it  in  motion.  The  figure  of  "withdrawing  within  our  own  shell "  fur- 
nished the  opponents  of  the  embargo  with  the  nickname  of  "  the  terrapin  policy." 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  241 

April  it  increased  the  regular  army  by  6000  men.   Altogether 
the  military  expenses  reached  about  $4,000,000. 

What  the  political  and  economic  effects  of  the  embargo  would 
have  been  if  it  had  been  strictly  enforced  we  cannot  say.  That 
it  was  not  strictly  enforced,  in  spite  of  supplementary  acts  ex- 
tending the  authority  of  the  President  to  the  control  of  practi- 
cally all  our  coastwise  and  internal  commerce  by  land  and  sea, 
is  proved  by  the  figures  of  Gallatin's  Treasury  reports.  Our 
imports  and  exports,  though  falling  far  below  the  banner  year 
of  1807,  still  totaled  $78,000,000  during  the  embargo  year  of 
1808,  and  the  receipts  into  our  Treasury  for  the  twelve  months 
ending  September  30,  1808,  were  $10,000,000.  Pinkney  wrote 
to  Madison  from  London  that  England  was  feeling  the  effects 
of  the  embargo,  but  that  her  people  did  not  believe  that  we 
were  sufficiently  " capable  of  persevering  in  self-denial"  to 
maintain  the  policy.  How  correct  this  opinion  was  is  shown  by 
the  rising  spirit  of  protest  in  our  country  as  the  severe  measures 
for  the  enforcement  of  the  embargo  succeeded  one  another 
without  bringing  the  hoped-for  concessions  from  Canning  or 
Napoleon.  The  ultra-Federalists  of  New  England  of  course 
made  political  capital  of  the  embargo,  which  they  represented  as 
a  diabolical  scheme  of  Jefferson  and  the  "  Virginia  lordlings"  to 
ruin  the  prosperity  of  their  section  of  the  country.  They  rejoiced 
at  the  embarrassments  of  the  administration  in  trying  to  stop 
the  smuggling  of  beef,  flour,  pork,  potash,  and  lumber  across  the 
Canadian  frontier.  They  kept  their  merchantmen  abroad  earn- 
ing high  freights  in  the  European  colonial  and  coasting  trade 
under  British  licenses.  When  the  President  resorted  to  force  to 
carry  out  the  law,  ordering  Governor  Tompkins  of  New  York  to 
suppress  the  smuggling  by  the  militia,  they  taunted  him  with  the 
practice  of  that  executive  tyranny  which  he  had  always  professed 
to  abhor.  Worst  of  all,  they  made  open  and  boastful  profession 
of  their  attachment  to  England  and  their  hatred  for  France. 
Senator  Pickering,  still  their  chief,  assured  Canning's  special 
envoy,  George  Rose,  that  the  embargo  could  not  be  enforced, 
that  it  would  soon  ruin  the  party  in  power,  and  that  the 
Federalists,  the  friends  of  England,  would  soon  be  in  the 


242  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

saddle  again.  Plans  were  on  foot,  as  in  1804,  for  the  separation 
of  New  England  from  the  "  tyrannous"  government  of  the 
Southern  states. 

After  a  year's  experiment  with  the  embargo  the  farmers  were 
everywhere  feeling  the  distress  of  falling  prices,  and  the  re- 
solves of  the  town  meetings  were  "  shaking  the  ground"  beneath 
Jefferson's  feet.  It  was  evident  that  further  insistence  on 
the  policy  would  mean  civil  strife.  Furthermore,  England  had 
entered  the  Peninsular  War,  had  freed  Portugal  from  the 
clutches  of  Napoleon,  and,  supporting  the  revolt  of  the  Span- 
iards against  the  emperor's  insane  tyranny,  had  opened  to  her 
trade  the  rich  markets  of  the  Spanish  colonies  in  America. 
Jefferson  yielded,  reluctant  and  unconvinced,  to  the  pressure 
of  circumstances.1  On  March  i,  1809,  the  Embargo  Act  was 
repealed,  and  in  its  place  was  substituted  a  Nonintercourse  Act 
with  England  and  France.  The  President  was  authorized,  in 
case  either  Great  Britain  or  France  ceased  to  violate  the  neu- 
tral commerce  of  the  United  States,  to  declare  the  same  by  a 
proclamation,  after  which  trade  might  be  renewed  with  the 
compliant  nation.  This  was  the  beginning  of  the  end  of  the 
policy  of  "  peaceful  coercion."  Three  days  later,  smarting  under 
the  first  defeat  at  the  hands  of  a  Congress  which  he  had 
dominated  for  eight  years  as  no  other  president  in  our  history 
has  done,  Jefferson  resigned  the  reins  of  government  to  his 
successor,  James  Madison,  and  retired  to  Monticello. 

Jefferson  has  been  rather  severely  handled  by  American 
historians.  In  spite  of  their  recognition  of  his  invaluable  serv- 
ices for  the  cause  of  our  independence,  of  his  correct  and  vigor- 
ous diplomatic  conduct  in  the  French  mission  and  the  office  of 
Secretary  of  State,  of  his  magnificent  courage  in  sweeping 
away  the  political  and  ecclesiastical  survivals  in  the  law  code  of 
Virginia,  of  his  skill  and  constancy  in  the  building  of  a  truly 


a  year  later  he  wrote  to  Henry  Dearborn  that  the  Federalists  in  Con- 
gress became  panic-stricken  and  defeated  the  only  policy  that  could  bring  Eng- 
land to  terms:  "They  believed  in  the  alternative  of  repeal  or  civil  war,  and 
produced  the  fatal  measure  of  repeal.  This  is  the  immediate  parent  of  all  our 
present  evils,  and  has  reduced  us  to  a  low  standing  in  the  eyes  of  the  world." 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  243 

democratic  party  in  the  decade  of  Federalism,  they  still  call 
him  "weak,"  "vacillating,"  "insincere,"  "tricky,"  and  hold  him 
responsible  for  the  unpreparedness  of  our  country  for  the  War 
of  1812  and  for  the  general  low  tone  of  our  public  adminis- 
tration in  the  period  from  1807  to  the  close  of  our  second  war 
with  England.  This  is  not  the  place  to  enter  into  a  detailed 
defense  of  Thomas  Jefferson's  public  policy.  We  may  concede 
that  he  had  faults.  He  clung  to  hobbies  (like  the  desire  for 
West  Florida  and  the  belief  in  gunboats)  with  an  unfortunate 
tenacity.  He  was  often  indirect  in  his  methods  and  dangerously 
near  to  duplicity  in  his  words.  He  undoubtedly  assumed  a 
"war  posture"  for  the  sake  of  coercion  when  he  had  no  idea  of 
fighting.  Yet  he  was  in  advance  of  his  Congress  in  the  matter 
of  national  defense  and  preparedness.  He  constantly  asked  for 
the  increase  of  the  militia,  with  improvements  in  its  classifi- 
cation and  mobilization,  for  fortifications  and  seaport  defenses, 
which  Congress  refused  to  grant.1  The  embargo  was  not  a 
capricious  invention  of  Jefferson's  to  escape  from  the  dilemma 
of  war  or  submission,  but  a  policy  suggested  by  Cary  Nicholson 
(see  page  240,  note),  approved  by  the  entire  cabinet,  passed 
by  large  majorities  in  both  branches  of  Congress,  and  still 
supported,  a  full  year  after  its  passage,  by  a  vote  of  64  to  49  in 
the  House.  And  as  to  a  "spineless"  foreign  policy,  it  was  Jef- 
ferson's bitterest  enemy,  John  Randolph,  who  moved  in  Con- 
gress that  it  was  "inexpedient  to  resort  to  war  with  Great 
Britain"  and  ridiculed  Madison's  statement  of  the  depredations 
of  that  nation  upon  our  commerce  as  "a  shilling  pamphlet 
launched  against  800  vessels  of  war."  Whether  we  could  have 
avoided  the  War  of  1812  if  Jefferson  had  not  been  replaced  in 
the  White  House  by  the  less  forceful  and  less  judicious  Madison, 
it  is  impossible  to  say.  But  at  any  rate  it  was  fortunate  that  the 
war  did  not  come  in  1807,  when  Napoleon  was  sweeping  to  the 
climax  of  his  career,  but  in  1812,  when  his  power  was  already 
breaking  against  the  rock  of  Spanish  and  Russian  resistance. 

xln  a  letter  written  October  16,  1814,  he  attributed  the  embarrassments  of  the 
War  of  1812  to  the  failure  of  Congress  to  adopt  his  recommendations. 


244  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

No  one  could  have  foreseen  the  sinister  events  of  the  year 
1807,  and  the  United  States  could  not  have  been  "prepared" 
against  them  except  by  the  utter  abandonment  of  the  policy 
long  adopted  by  all  our  political  leaders.  It  is  pathetic,  in  the 
light  of  these  events,  to  read  Jefferson's  message  sent  to  Con- 
gress in  December,  1806,  and  Gallatin's  report  of  a  few  months 
later.  Our  debt  had  been  reduced  by  $33,580,000,  and  would 
be  wiped  out  in  the  course  of  three  years.  Then  handsome 
surpluses  would  begin  to  accrue  to  the  Treasury,  which  could 
be  used  for  great  schemes  of  national  development,  "to  open  new 
channels  of  communication  between  the  states  .  .  .  and  to 
cement  their  union  by  new  and  indissoluble  ties."  Our  coasts 
should  be  surveyed  and  fortified,  a  great  system  of  canals  should 
connect  the  Eastern  rivers,  and  roads  should  be  built  joining 
them  to  the  navigable  headwaters  of  the  Mississippi  Basin.  The 
first  appropriations  for  the  national  Cumberland  Road  were 
actually  made.  A  national  university  was  planned,  "to  supply 
those  sciences  which  contribute  to  the  improvement  of  the  coun- 
try and  some  of  them  to  its  preservation."  These  promising 
plans,  which  show  how  far  Jefferson  had  advanced  on  the  path 
of  nationalism,  were  rudely  interrupted  by  the  alarums  of  war. 
It  was  not  Jefferson's  fault  but  his  misfortune  that  for  the  rest 
of  his  term  he  had  to  meet  the  threats  of  war  with  the  weapons 
of  peace.  One  crumb  of  comfort  he  had  in  these  last  distressing 
years  of  his  administration.  On  the  first  of  January,  1808,  the 
law  went  into  effect  prohibiting  the  importation  of  African  slaves 
into  the  United  States. 

James  Madison,  who  was  Jefferson's  own  choice  for  his  suc- 
cessor, was  elected  over  his  Federalist  opponent,  C.  C.  Pinckney, 
in  the  embargo  year  by  a  vote  of  122  to  47.  Madison  was 
a  master  of  ideas,  but  not  of  men.  Power  slipped  from  the  hands 
of  the  executive  and  was  contended  for  by  factions  in  Congress. 
Disaffection  entered  the  cabinet,  and  confused  counsels.  Gal- 
latin,  the  ablest  man  of  the  administration,  was  opposed  by  the 
inefficient  Secretary  of  State,  Robert  Smith  of  Maryland,  who 
was  supported  by  a  cabal  in  Congress  headed  by  his  wealthy 


THE  UNITED  STATES 

At  the  Close  of 
JEFFERSON'S  ADMINISTRATION 


—  Natural  Western  Boundary  —  —Route  of  Lewis  and  Clark 

of  Louisiana  Purchase  1804-1806 

•«-«-  Boundary  fixed  by  Treaty     — »— Route  of  Zebulon  Pike 
with  Spain  in  1819 

o  o  oooBoundary  fixed  by  Treaty      Route  of  Zebulon  Pike 

with  Great  Britain  in  1818  1806-1808 

SCALE   OF  MILES 


0  100  200  300  400 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  245 

merchant  brother,  Senator  Samuel  Smith.  Two  years  passed 
before  Madison  summoned  the  courage  and  vigor  to  put  an  end 
to  the  strife  by  replacing  Smith  with  James  Monroe.  All  New 
England  except  Vermont  reverted  to  the  Federalist  column. 
The  Republican  majority  was  still  large  in  both  branches  of 
Congress  (95  to  46  and  24  to  10),  but  it  was  no  longer  guided 
by  the  will  of  Thomas  Jefferson. 

For  a  brief  moment  at  the  beginning  of  Madison's  adminis- 
tration, it  looked  as  though  our  battle  for  neutrality  through 
diplomatic  negotiations  might  be  successful.  Whether  because 
of  the  distress  to  British  manufacturers  and  merchants  which 
the  embargo  brought,  or  because  more  compliance  was  hoped 
for  from  a  president  who  was  suspected  by  even  some  of  his  own 
party  of  not  being  wholly  purged  of  the  old  leaven  of  Feder- 
alism, Canning  actually  proposed  a  settlement  of  differences  at 
the  opening  of  the  year  1809.  He  instructed  David  Erskine,  the 
British  minister  at  Washington,  to  offer  the  withdrawal  of 
the  Orders  in  Council  on  three  conditions :  (i)  that  we  should 
restore  commercial  intercourse  with  England  while  still  retain- 
ing the  Nonintercourse  Act  against  France  5(2)  that  we  should 
accept  the  "Rule  of  1756,"  against  which  we  had  contended 
ever  since  the  beginning  of  the  war  between  England  and 
France;  (3)  that  we  should  permit  the  British  navy  to  seize 
American  ships  trading  with  countries  which  obeyed  Napoleon's 
.Decrees.  Had  Erskine  communicated  the  instructions  to  Robert 
Smith  and  Madison  in  extenso,  as  he  was  ordered  to  do  by 
Canning,  they  would  have  been  rejected  at  once.  But  Erskine 
was  a  liberal  Whig  with  an  American  wife,  and  in  his  anxiety 
to  restore  unity  between  the  two  great  English-speaking  peoples 
he  " modified"  his  instructions,  representing  to  Madison  merely 
that  the  Orders  would  be  withdrawn  if  we  reopened  intercourse 
with  England  and  refused  to  do  so  with  France.  Madison, 
fully  as  anxious  as  Erskine  to  come  to  terms,  accepted  the 
British  minister's  advances  without  asking  to  see  his  instruc- 
tions, and  on  April  19,  1809,  proclaimed  that  trade  with  Great 
Britain  might  be  renewed  on  the  tenth  of  the  following  June. 


246  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Our  shippers  were  jubilant,  and  Madison  was  praised  as  a 
statesman  by  the  men  who  had  blamed  Jefferson  as  a  bungler.1 
Without  waiting  for  the  tenth  of  June  American  ships  sailed  by 
scores  to  British  ports,  loaded  with  cotton,  lumber,  grain,  and 
tobacco.  Then  came  the  reckoning.  The  moment  he  heard 
that  Erskine  had  exceeded  his  instructions  Canning  recalled  him 
and  disavowed  his  arrangement,  though  honorably  exempting 
from  seizure  the  American  ships  that  had  already  sailed  on  his 
false  encouragement.  Nothing  was  left  for  Madison  to  do  but 
to  issue  a  second  proclamation,  restoring  the  Nonintercourse 
Act  against  Great  Britain.  The  Erskine  fiasco  left  our  relations 
with  England  in  a  worse  state  than  ever.  Nor  were  matters 
improved  when  Madison,  taking  offense  at  the  language  of 
Erskine's  successor  Jackson  (which  he  construed  as  a  charge 
that  the  American  government  really  knew  the  contents  of 
Erskine's  instructions,  but  persuaded  him  to  violate  them), 
notified  the  British  minister  that  further  conversation  with  him 
would  be  futile. 

The  Nonintercourse  Act  of  March  i,  1809,  was  to  expire  by 
limitation  at  the  close  of  the  actual  session  of  Congress.  With 
the  new  year  (1810)  our  confused  and  exasperated  legislators 
abruptly  changed  their  tactics.  The  Treasury  report  showed 
for  the  first  time  a  deficit.  Our  shippers,  exalted  by  the  brief 
renewal  of  commerce,  were  loath  to  obey  the  new  restrictions. 
Embargo  and  nonintercourse  had  not  brought  Napoleon  and 
Canning  to  just  respect  for  neutral  rights,  though  they  had 
injured  our  trade  and  impoverished  our  Treasury.  As  John 
Randolph  not  very  elegantly  remarked,  it  was  like  cutting  off 
the  toes  to  cure  the  corns.  A  new  policy  was  framed  substitut- 
ing enticement  for  pressure.  After  much  wrangling  the  House 
agreed,  on  the  first  of  May,  1810,  on  Macon's  Bill  No.  2,  which 
opened  commerce  again  with  all  the  world  but  authorized 
Madison,  in  case  either  France  or  Great  Britain  should  modify 

1John  Randolph  compared  "the  sound  and  healthy  body  of  the  present  ad- 
ministration" to  "the  dead  corpse  of  the  last."  Jefferson,  though  sincerely  glad 
to  see  results  of  peaceful  coercion,  was  suspicious  and  warned  Madison  that  the 
terms  seemed  too  good  to  be  true. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  247 

their  edicts  before  March  3,  1811,  in  such  way  "as  to  cease  to 
violate  the  neutral  commerce  of  the  United  States,"  to  revive 
nonintercourse  against  the  other  power.  In  other  words,  as 
Schouler  says,  "  American  influence  was  put  up  at  auction." 

Napoleon  Bonaparte  was  too  shrewd  to  let  the  opportunity 
pass  without  a  bid.  He  had  wished  since  the  beginning  of  hostil- 
ities to  embroil  England  and  America.  If  he  could  not  provoke 
the  United  States  to  war,  he  wanted  at  least  the  kind  of  neu- 
trality which  would  deprive  the  English  fleet  of  its  commerce. 
The  embargo  was  welcome  to  him  for  this  reason.  The  Non- 
intercourse  Act  was  less  welcome,  because  by  freeing  American 
shipping  to  the  ports  not  under  his  control  it  put  that  shipping 
at  the  mercy  of  the  British  cruisers.  The  Macon  Bill,  finally, 
by  restoring  American  commerce  to  its  status  before  the  em- 
bargo, was  hardly  less  in  his  eyes  than  an  alliance  between  the 
United  States  and  England.  Without  an  American  fleet  to 
protect  that  commerce  or  a  French  fleet  to  interrupt  it,  Eng- 
land was  again  restored  to  the  command  of  the  seas.  In  this 
extremity  he  resorted  to  the  trump  card  of  his  diplomacy — a 
lie.  His  foreign  minister,  the  Due  de  Cadore,  addressed  a  letter 
to  our  minister  at  Paris  (August  5,  1810)  declaring  that  "the 
decrees  of  Berlin  and  Milan  are  revoked,  and  that  after  No- 
vember they  will  cease  to  have  effect — it  being  understood  that 
in  consequence  of  this  declaration  the  English  are  to  revoke 
their  Orders  in  Council  ...  or  that  the  United  States  cause 
their  rights  to  be  respected  by  the  English."  The  letter  was 
smeared  with  honeyed  words:  "His  Majesty  loves  the  Amer- 
icans ;  their  prosperity  and  commerce  are  within  the  scope  of 
his  policy  [ !  ]  The  independence  of  America  is  one  of  the  prin- 
cipal titles  of  glory  to  France.  Since  that  epoch  the  Emperor 
is  pleased  in  aggrandizing  the  United  States."  The  conduct  of 
Napoleon  since  the  seizure  of  the  Horizon  in  1807  should  have 
been  sufficient  warning  to  Madison  that  his  promise  was  as 
empty  as  his  flattery  was  insulting.  By  the  Bayonne  Decree  of 
April  17,  1808,  he  had  sequestered  all  American  vessels  in  his 
ports  on  the  cynical  plea  that  they  must  be  Englishmen  in 
disguise,  because  the  embargo  forbade  American  vessels  to 


248  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

sail  from  home!  By  the  Rambouillet  Decree  of  March  23, 
1810,  he  ordered  all  American  ships  that  had  entered  his  ports 
since  the  previous  May  to  be  seized  and  sold.  These  confis- 
cations had  brought  the  imperial  treasury  between  $8,000,000 
and  $10,000,000,  and  they  were  not  yet  at  an  end.  For  on  the 
same  day  that  Cadore  wrote  the  letter  announcing  the  with- 
drawal of  the  Berlin  and  Milan  Decrees  Napoleon  ordered 
further  seizures  by  the  secret  Trianon  Decree,  and  spoke  of  the 
Berlin  and  Milan  Decrees  as  "permanent  laws  of  the  Empire."1 
It  was  in  vain  that  the  marquis  of  Wellesley,  who  had  suc- 
ceeded Canning  in  the  foreign  office,  warned  Pinkney  that 
Napoleon's  promise  in  the  Cadore  letter  was  no  promise  at  all, 
but  only  a  ruse  to  tempt  England  to  relax  her  Orders  before 
November  i.  Madison  jumped  at  every  offer,  from  whatever 
source  it  came,  to  secure  the  freedom  of  our  commerce  by 
peaceful  coercion.  With  the  same  precipitate  confidence  with 
which  he  had  renewed  intercourse  with  England  in  1809 
on  Erskine's  garbled  representation,  he  prohibited  intercourse 
with  England  in  1810  on  Napoleon's  flimsy  promise.  On  No- 
vember 2  he  issued  a  proclamation  declaring  that  the  French 
Decrees  had  been  revoked  and  that  nonintercourse  with  Great 
Britain  should  be  revived  unless  her  Orders  were  repealed 
before  February  2,  1811.  Our  commerce  was  increasing  rap- 
idly under  the  Macon  Bill.  A  tonnage  of  127,000  was  added  to 
our  merchant  marine  in  the  year  1810.  Our  exports  rose  in  that 
year  from  $52,000,000  to  $67,000,000,  and  our  customs  receipts 
from  $7,000,000  to  $12,750,000.  As  more  than  half  of  our 
foreign  trade  was  carried  on  with  Great  Britain  and  her  de- 
pendencies, the  chances  seemed  good  that  the  British  ministry 
would  recede  from  its  position.  But  Downing  Street  knew 
Napoleon  better  than  Washington  did.  The  ministry  refused 
to  fall  into  his  trap.  The  second  of  February,  1811,  passed 

1This  double  dealing  was  discovered  by  Gallatin,  our  minister  to  France,  in 
1821  and  called  by  him  "a  glaring  act  of  combined  injustice,  bad  faith,  and 
meanness."  Twenty  years  after  the  overthrow  of  Napoleon  we  recovered  some 
$5,000,000  damages,  called  the  "French  claims,"  for  these  depredations  on 
our  shipping. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  249 

without  any  modification  of  the  Orders,  and  one  month  later 
Congress  sanctioned  the  revival  of  nonintercourse  with  Great 
Britain  by  a  large  majority. 

Public  sentiment  in  America  was  setting  strongly  toward 
war.  It  was  felt  that  we  should  have  done  with  protests  and 
expedients,  with  shifting  policies  that  waited  on  Napoleon's 
whims  or  Wellesley's  pride,  and  manfully  assert  our  rights  as 
a  free  people.  The  congressional  election  of  1810,  sweeping 
out  nearly  half  the  members  of  the  House,  returned  a  group  of 
new  men,  mostly  from  the  South  and  West,  who  represented  the 
rising  generation.  Henry  Clay  of  Kentucky  was  their  leader, 
and  with  him  were  associated  John  C.  Calhoun,  Langdon 
Cheves,  and  William  Lowndes  of  South  Carolina,  Felix  Grundy 
of  Tennessee,  Peter  Porter  of  New  York,  and  Richard  Johnson 
of  Kentucky.  They  were  aggressive,  confident,  and  intensely 
patriotic.  They  were  all  under  forty.  They  had  no  pa- 
tience with  the  tortuous  diplomatic  policy  of  European 
courts,  no  lingering  memories  of  the  evolution  from  colonies 
into  states,  no  scruples  lest  the  rights  of  the  states  should  be 
infringed  by  too  vigorous  a  policy  in  Congress.  They  were 
of  a  different  generation  from  the  Jeffersons,  the  Madisons, 
and  the  Macons.  John  Randolph  heaped  his  sarcasm  on  "the 
boys"  and  dubbed  them  "war  hawks,"  but  their  spirit  bore 
down  all  opposition  and  made  further  hope  of  reconciliation 
with  England  vain. 

Before  the  "war  hawks"  took  their  seat  in  the  new  Congress, 
which  Madison  convened  on  November  4,  1811,  important 
events  had  occurred  to  widen  the  breach  between  England 
and  the  United  States.  At  the  end  of  February  William 
Pinkney,  tired  of  fruitless  conversations  with  Wellesley,  had 
asked  for  his  audience  of  leave,  and  "for  the  first  time  in  the 
history  of  our  country  an  American  minister  quitted  London  in 
a  hostile  and  threatening  manner."  In  April  Robert  Smith 
had  been  replaced  in  the  State  Department  by  James  Monroe, 
whose  experience  in  Paris,  Madrid,  and  London  had  disabused 
him  of  confidence  in  the  favor  of  any  of  the  chancelleries  of 
Europe  for  the  cause  of  American  rights.  On  May  16  the 


250  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

United  States  frigate  President,  Commodore  Rodgers  command- 
ing, while  patrolling  our  shores  to  protect  merchantmen  against 
the  impressments  which  Great  Britain  had  resumed  after  the 
revival  of  the  Nonintercourse  Act  against  her,  fell  in  with  the 
British  sloop  of  war  Little  Belt  and  in  a  brisk  battle  forced  her 
to  strike  her  colors.  Rodgers's  victory  was  hailed  with  joy  as  a 
tardy  but  complete  revenge  for  the  Chesapeake  humiliation  in 
the  same  waters  four  years  earlier.  And  when  the  new  British 
minister,  Foster,  arrived  in  Washington,  authorized  at  last  to 
settle  the  Chesapeake  affair  by  restoring  the  two  surviving 
sailors  to  the  deck  from  which  they  had  been  taken,  he  found 
the  Americans  already  fully  satisfied  by  Rodgers's  victory  and 
talking  of  the  invasion  of  Canada  rather  than  the  punishment 
of  Berkeley. 

Just  after  Congress  had  assembled,  news  came  from  our 
Western  frontier  calculated  still  further  to  exasperate  our  feel- 
ings against  Great  Britain.  The  Indians  in  the  territory  beyond 
Ohio  were  disturbed  by  the  constant  westward  pressure  of 
our  pioneers.  Some  of  the  tribes  united  under  the  formidable 
chieftain  Tecumseh  to  resist  further  encroachment  on  the  land 
which  the  Great  Spirit  had  given  them  for  their  hunting- 
grounds.  Tecumseh  and  his  twin  brother,  "the  Prophet,"  or 
medicine  man,  established  their  headquarters  on  the  Wabash 
near  Tippecanoe  Creek,  to  bid  defiance  to  William  Henry 
Harrison,  the  governor  of  the  Indian  Territory.  On  Novem- 
ber 7,  1811,  while  Tecumseh  was  absent  in  the  South  stirring 
up  the  Creeks,  Choctaws,  and  Cherokees  to  join  in  the  con- 
federacy, the  Prophet  made  an  attack  on  Harrison's  force. 
The  Indians  were  driven  off,  and  the  next  day  they  abandoned 
their  village,  which  Harrison  entered  and  burned.  Tecumseh 
went  over  to  the  British  in  Canada,  who  had  long  been  seeking 
to  sow  discord  between  the  Indians  and  their  " white  brothers" 
south  of  the  lakes.  Harrison  confirmed  the  belief  of  our  Western 
pioneers  that  England  was  putting  arms  into  the  hands  of  the 
Indians,  by  reporting  the  capture  of  quantities  of  English  gun- 
powder and  rifles  on  the  battlefield  of  Tippecanoe,  apparently 
purchased  from  the  king's  stores  at  Maiden. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  251 

President  Madison  was  already  yielding  to  the  popular  pres- 
sure for  war.  He  recounted  our  grievances  at  length  in  his 
message  of  November  5,  1811,  asking  Congress  to  "put  the 
country  into  an  attitude  demanded  by  the  crisis."  Congress 
came  to  his  support.  It  voted  to  increase  the  regular  army  by 
25,000  soldiers,  permitted  the  President  to  accept  50,000  new 
volunteers,  ordered  the  refitting  of  the  frigates  Adams,  Constel- 
lation, and  Chesapeake,  appropriated  $200,000  annually  for 
three  years  for  further  naval  repairs,  authorized  a  loan  of 
$11,000,000  in  6  per  cent  bonds,  and  sanctioned  the  levy  of  taxes 
on  salt,  whisky,  slaves,  and  carriages  in  case  war  should  come. 
"The  period  has  arrived,"  said  Porter  in  his  report  from  the 
Committee  on  Foreign  Relations,  "when  it  is  the  sacred  duty  of 
Congress  to  call  for  the  patriotism  and  resources  of  the  coun- 
try." On  May  19,  1812,  the  sloop  Hornet  arrived,  bringing  a 
dispatch  from  the  British  foreign  office  which  Madison  many 
years  later  called  "the  more  immediate  impulse  to  the  war." 
It  declared  that  Great  Britain  could  make  no  change  in  her 
Orders  in  Council  until  Napoleon  had  absolutely  and  uncon- 
ditionally rescinded  his  Decrees,  and  spoke  of  America's  accept- 
ance of  Napoleon's  treacherous  proffer  as  "utterly  subversive 
of  the  most  important  and  indisputable  maritime  rights  of 
the  British  Empire." 

Forced  to  choose,  as  he  said,  between  war  and  degradation, 
Madison,  on  June  i,  1812,  sent  in  to  Congress  the  single  vig- 
orous message  of  his  administration.  In  it  he  reviewed  the 
long  list  of  outrages  on  our  maritime  rights  as  a  neutral  since 
the  renewal  of  the  European  war  in  1803:  the  illegal  "paper 
blockade";  the  violation  of  the  American  flag  on  the  great 
highway  of  nations  by  the  seizure  of  persons  sailing  under  it; 
the  hovering  of  British  cruisers  on  our  very  coast,  harassing  our 
ships  as  they  went  and  came,  and  even  "wantonly  shedding 
the  blood  of  our  citizens."  "Such  is  the  spectacle  of  injuries 
and  indignities  which  have  been  heaped  upon  our  country,  and 
such  the  crisis  which  its  unexampled  forebearance  and  con- 
ciliatory efforts  have  not  been  able  to  avert.  .  .  .  Whether 
the  United  States  shall  continue  passive  under  these  accumulat- 


252  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ing  wrongs,  or,  opposing  force  to  force  in  defence  of  their 
natural  rights,  shall  commit  a  just  cause  into  the  hands  of  the 
Almighty  Dispenser  of  events,  ...  is  a  solemn  question  which 
the  Constitution  wisely  confides  to  the  legislative  department 
of  the  government.  In  recommending  it  to  their  early  delib- 
erations I  am  happy  in  the  assurance  that  the  decision  will 
be  worthy  the  enlightened  and  patriotic  councils  of  a  virtuous, 
a  free,  and  a  powerful  nation."  The  hand  was  Madison's,  but 
the  voice  was  Henry  Clay's.  Congress  by  a  vote  of  79  to  49 
in  the  House  and  19  to  13  in  the  Senate  declared  for  war,1 
and  on  June  18  Madison  signed  the  fateful  bill.  "I  flung 
forward  the  flag  of  the  country,"  said  the  aged  Madison  in 
a  conversation  with  George  Bancroft  a  quarter  of  a  century 
later,  "sure  that  the  people  would  press  onward  and  defend  it." 

THE  WAR  OF  1812 

The  War  of  1812  was  a  blunder.  It  was  unnecessary,  im- 
politic, untimely,  and  rash.  Not  that  our  grievances  against 
Great  Britain  had  not  been  serious  enough  for  several  years 
past  to  justify  war.  The  indictment  of  Madison's  message 
of  June  i  was  not  exaggerated.  But  those  grievances  were 
less  acute  in  the  summer  of  1812  than  at  any  other  moment 
since  the  attack  on  the  Chesapeake  five  years  before.  A  wise 
and  statesmanlike  view  at  Washington  must  have  seen  in  the 
situation  both  in  England  and  on  the  continent  of  Europe,  in 
the  twelve  months  past,  fair  promise  that  the  grievances  would 
cease  at  no  very  distant  date.  We  had  been  patient  in  the 
years  of  great  trial  ;  we  lost  our  patience  in  the  days  of  relief. 
We  allowed  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  by  a  promise  whose  hollow- 
ness  was  evident  to  every  statesman  of  judgment  on  both  sides 
of  the  ocean  the  day  after  it  was  given,  to  force  us  into  a  war 
with  England  at  the  moment  when  he  was  leading  his  grand 


vote  shows  a  good  deal  of  opposition  as  compared  with  the  votes 
committing  us  to  our  other  foreign  wars.  On  the  Mexican  War  the  vote  was 
174  to  14  in  the  House  and  40  to  2  in  the  Senate  ;  we  entered  the  World  War 
by  a  vote  of  373  to  50  in  the  House  and  86  to  6  in  the  Senate. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  253 

army  into  Russia  to  destroy  the  last  state  on  the  Continent 
that  dared  to  brave  his  despotic  will.  The  Decrees  of  Napoleon 
and  the  British  Orders  in  Council  were  admittedly  the  basic 
causes  for  the  war.1  If  our  State  Department  had  heeded  and 
understood  the  admirable  dispatches  from  our  minister  John 
Quincy  Adams  at  St.  Petersburg,  it  would  have  read,  in  the 
refusal  of  the  Czar  to  shut  the  Baltic  Sea  to  American  com- 
merce at  the  behest  of  Napoleon,  the  beginning  of  the  downfall 
of  the  Continental  System.  If  our  able  minister  William  Pinkney 
had  been  ordered  to  remain  at  London  instead  of  leaving  in  a 
huff  in  the  spring  of  1811,  he  would  have  noted  beneath  all  the 
stiff  pride  of  Wellesley  and  Spencer  Perceval  the  growing  de- 
mand in  Parliament  for  concessions,  which  actually  resulted  in 
the  announcement  of  the  total  repeal  of  the  Orders  in  Coun- 
cil two  days  before  our  Congress  declared  war.  If  General 
Armstrong  had  remained  at  Paris,  he  would  not  have  allowed 
Napoleon's  foreign  minister,  Maret,  to  palm  off  on  him  a  docu- 
ment antedated  by  a  year,  which  repeated  the  lie  of  the  revoca- 
tion of  the  Berlin  and  Milan  Decrees  as  applied  to  America. 
But  we  abandoned  diplomacy  at  the  very  moment  when  we 
needed  it  most.  In  the  summer  of  1811,  when  the  war  spirit 
was  rising  in  the  country,  and  the  Congress  which  the  war 
hawks  were  to  dominate  was  already  called  in  early  session, 
we  had  no  minister  at  the  court  of  England  or  France.  A 
few  months  more  of  patient  diplomacy  would  have  averted 
the  war. 

If,  however,  national  honor  demanded  that  we  should 
fight  in  1812,  it  is  by  no  means  clear  that  England  was  the 
nation  with  which  we  should  have  fought.  So  far  as  it  lay  within 
his  power,  Napoleon  was  as  contemptuous  of  American  rights 
as  was  Great  Britain.  True,  his  cruisers  did  not  hover  on 
our  coasts — for  he  had  no  cruisers  to  hover ;  he  did  not  impress 
American  sailors — for  he  had  no  fleet  to  man  with  them.  But 

1To  be  sure,  the  impressment  issue  was  constant,  but  as  Henry  Adams  points 
out,  it  had  never  been  made  a  casus  belli.  Great  Britain's  attitude  was  generally 
one  of  willingness  to  adjust  it.  It  became  a  waning  issue  after  England's  com- 
plete defeat  of  Napoleon  on  the  sea  (1805). 


254  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

he  treacherously  confiscated  millions  of  dollars'  worth  of  Amer- 
ican shipping  in  the  ports  of  France,  Denmark,  Holland,  Spain, 
and  Naples  and  appropriated  the  receipts  to  the  imperial  treas- 
ury. A  table  contributed  to  Congress  by  Madison  in  July,  1812, 
showed  that  the  French  had  seized  558  American  vessels  and 
the  British  389  during  the  five  preceding  years.  John  Rus- 
sell, our  charge  d'affaires  at  Paris,  wrote  repeatedly  in  1811  to 
warn  Madison  that  "the  great  object  of  Napoleon's  policy" 
was  to  " entangle  us  in  a  war  with  England,"  and  that  the  French 
emperor  refused  to  give  any  clear  evidence  of  the  repeal  of  the 
Decrees,  "test  it  should  induce  the  extinction  of  the  British  Or- 
ders and  thereby  appease  our  irritation"  against  Great  Britain. 
Even  Madison  himself  naively  agreed  in  a  letter  to  Jefferson 
(March,  1811)  that  it  was  "difficult  to  understand  the  meaning 
of  Bonaparte  towards  us,"  and  attempted  to  excuse  him  for  his 
"obvious  folly"  on  the  score  of  his  "ignorance  of  commerce." 
Furthermore,  the  British  ministers  were  not  using  threats, 
cajolery,  and  ruse  to  drive  us  into  a  war  with  France.  If 
Canning  was  brutal  and  Wellesley  haughty,  they  were  at  least 
frank.  Neither  of  them  used  sickening  words  of  flattery  to  us 
and  lied  in  his  throat.  Finally,  it  was  Napoleon  and  not  Eng- 
land that  was  the  enemy  of  the  human  race.  Our  declaration 
of  war  on  the  power  that  most  consistently  and  effectively  stood 
between  Napoleon  and  an  enslaved  Europe  seemed  to  many 
in  our  country  little  less  than  striking  an  alliance  with  the 
Corsican  plunderer. 

Yet  it  is  not  hard  to  see  why  England  was  the  worse  enemy 
in  the  popular  mind.  Aside  from  the  general  considerations 
that  the  whole  leaning  of  the  party  which  had  been  in  power 
since  the  beginning  of  the  century  was  toward  France  and 
that  England  was  our  "traditional  enemy,"  the  specific  acts 
of  British  provocation  were  much  more  exasperating  than  any- 
thing Napoleon  could  do  to  us.  American  seamen  had  actually 
been  killed  by  British  cannon  balls  on  the  high  seas.  American 
sailors  had  actually  been  pressed  into  the  crews  of  British  men- 
of-war  to  endure  the  brutal  treatment,  the  starvation  rations, 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  2  5  5 

and  the  noisome  quarters  of  their  floating  prisons/  In  the 
South  and  West,  where  the  war  fever  was  intense,  both  eco- 
nomic and  political  interests  were  anti-British.  The  South,  not 
yet  bound  to  England  by  the  ties  of  cotton,  still  preserved  the 
Jeffersonian  prejudice  in  favor  of  agriculture  against  shipping. 
The  West,  ardent  for  expansion,  found  England  and  not  France 
athwart  the  path.  It  was  British  agents  in  Canada  who,  from 
St.  Clair's  defeat  in  1791  to  Harrison's  victory  in  1811,  had)  v 
encouraged  the  Indians  to  resist  our  advance  into  the  North-  < 
west,  which  Great  Britain  had  ceded  to  us  in  the  treaty  of  1783. 
It  was  the  British  minister  at  Washington  who  protested ' 
against  Madison's  occupation  of  West  Florida.2  And  since  the 
union  of  England  and  Spain  against  Napoleon  in  1808,  Great 
Britain  supplanted  France  as  the  strong  power  which  would 
prevent  our  flag  from  flying  over  the  fortresses  of  the  Gulf 
shore.  Napoleon's  diplomatic  policy  might  be  treacherous, 
and  his  confiscations  (chiefly  at  the  expense  of  New  England 
merchants)  exasperating.  But  Napoleon  was  remote,  and  Eng- 
land was  provokingly  near. 

Yet  England  did  not  want  war  with  us  any  more  than  we 
wanted  war  with  her.  She  was  laboring  under  great  economic 
and  political  distress.  The  burden  of  the  Napoleonic  wars  had 
driven  her  debt  up  to  nearly  $4,000,000,000.  Her  exports  had 
declined  33  per  cent  in  the  year  1811.  In  the  autumn  of  the 
same  year,  after  a  winter  of  bitter  cold  and  a  summer  of  rain 
and  fog,  the  price  of  wheat  rose. to  about  $4  a  bushel.  Riots 
broke  out  in  several  counties.  George  III  had  become  hope- 

aln  January,  1812,  Madison  sent  to  Congress  a  most  detailed  report  of  Mon- 
roe's on  cases  of  impressment  which  had  come  under  notice.  They  amount  to 
no  less  than  6057,  a  number  which  an  investigating  committee  of  the  Massachu- 
setts legislature  found  "three  or  four  times  too  large." 

2  Madison,  in  full  accord  with  the  Jeffersonian  theory  that  we  had  purchased 
West  Florida  in  the  Louisiana  treaty  of  1803,  issued  a  proclamation,  Octo- 
ber 27,  1810,  joining  that  region  to  the  territory  of  Orleans,  and  even  secured 
from  Congress,  in  1811,  authorization  to  occupy  East  Florida,  to  which  we 
had  never  pretended  to  have  a  claim.  The  part  of  West  Florida  west  of  the 
Pearl  River  was  incorporated  into  the  new  state  of  Louisiana  in  1812. 


256  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

lessly  insane,  and  in  the  interval  which  preceded  the  establish- 
ment of -the  regency  Spencer  Perceval,  the  ultra-Tory  minister, 
carried  on  the  government  with  a  high  hand.  From  the  as- 
sembling of  Parliament,  in  January,  1812,  it  was  evident  that 
the  Perceval  government  was  doomed.  The  marquis  of  Lands- 
downe  in  the  Lords  and  Henry  Brougham  in  the  Commons 
attacked  the  Orders  in  Council  and  pleaded  for  the  concessions 
necessary  for  the  reopening  of  the  trade  with  the  United  States, 
which  was  worth  $60,000,000  a  year  to  England.  Even  Canning 
was  won  to  the  policy  of  relaxation  and  voted  with  the  144 
members  who  supported  Brougham.  In  April  Castlereagh 
offered  to  stop  issuing  licenses  and  put  an  end  to  paper  block- 
ades if  the  United  States  would  restore  commercial  intercourse. 
A  few  days  later  the  regent  offered  to  declare  the  Orders  in 
Council  revoked  as  soon  as  Napoleon  should  give  convincing 
evidence  of  the  repeal  of  the  Berlin  and  Milan  Decrees.  All 
this  pointed  in  one  direction,  as  a  man  of  Pinkney's  sagacity 
must  have  seen  if  he  had  been  at  his  post  at  the  court  of  St. 
James.  Then  came  Perceval's  assassination  by  a  lunatic  in  the 
lobby  of  Parliament,  on  May  1 1 ;  and  in  the  confusion  of  the 
hour,  ere  the  literal  downfall  of  the  chief  was  known  in  America, 
President  Madison  sent  his  war  message  to  Congress. 

The  United  States  was  woefully  unprepared  for  war,  though 
in  a  flourishing  condition  for  times  of  peace.  Our  wealth  and 
population  were  growing  rapidly.  The  census  of  1810  showed 
a  population  of  7,240,000,  an  increase  of  35  per  cent  over  the 
number  at  the  time  of  Jefferson's  first  inauguration.  In  spite  of 
the  reestablishment  of  nonintercourse  with  Great  Britain,  our 
foreign  commerce  for  the  year  1811  was  still  well  over  $100,- 
000,000,  93  per  cent  of  which  was  carried  on  in  American  ships. 
Secretary  Gallatin's  report  to  Congress  in  November  presented 
the  pleasing  prospect  of  a  surplus  of  $5,000,000  for  the  next 
fiscal  year.  We  were  an  agricultural  country,  our  exports  con- 
sisting chiefly  of  cotton,  tobacco,  rice,  flour,  potatoes,  and 
grain.  But  Jefferson's  commercial  policy  had  already  caused 
the  diversion  of  considerable  capital  from  shipping  to  manufac- 
tures. By  1812  about  a  hundred  cotton  mills  in  the  country 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  257 

were  using  3,600,000  pounds  of  raw  cotton,  and  the  manufac- 
tures of  wool,  flax,  leather,  wood,  and  iron  were  mounting  to  a 
total  of  some  $50,000,000.  The  beginning  of  the  Cumberland 
Road  in  1807  (to  run  from  Cumberland,  Maryland,  through 
Pennsylvania  and  Ohio  to  the  West),  the  elaborate  plans  of 
Jefferson  and  Gallatin  for  the  devotion  of  national  income  to 
schemes  of  internal  improvement,  the  opening  of  the  North- 
west through  Harrison's  victory  over  the  Indians  at  Tippecanoe, 
and  the  placing  of  the  steamboat  on  the  Western  waters  all  gave 
promise  of  an  era  of  expansion  and  prosperity. 

But  none  of  this  wealth  and  opportunity  was  mobilized  for 
war.  The  regular  army  consisted  of  ten  half-filled  regiments 
of  untrained  and  ill-equipped  men,  dispersed  in  petty  garrison 
squads  along  our  extended  frontier  and  in  our  chief  coast  forts. 
From  the  Wabash  and  Maumee  Rivers  westward  the  country 
was  unprotected,  except  for  garrisons  of  about  100  men 
each  in  Forts  Dearborn  (Chicago)  at  the  foot  and  Mackinaw 
at  the  head  of  Lake  Michigan,  with  some  125  soldiers  at  the 
important  post  of  Detroit.  Congress  had  appropriated  barely 
$3,000,000  for  the  army  in  1811.  The  old  officers  were  de- 
scribed by  Winfield  Scott  as  "generally  sunk  in  either  sloth, 
ignorance,  or  habits  of  intemperate  drinking  .  .  .  Swaggerers, 
dependents,  decayed  gentlemen  .  .  .  utterly  unfit  for  any  mili- 
tary purpose  whatever."  The  new  appointments  of  1812  were 
little  better.  Henry  Dearborn,  Jefferson's  old  Secretary  of  War 
and  later  customs  officer  at  Boston,  was  named  senior  major 
general.  He  was  without  counsel  in  the  camp  or  experience 
in  the  field.  Thomas  Pinckney,  the  junior  major  general,  had 
made  an  enviable  record  in  diplomacy  at  the  courts  of  Madrid 
and  London,  but  his  military  education  had  ceased  thirty 
years  before,  with  the  defense  of  the  Carolinas  against  Corn- 
wallis  and  Tarleton.  Of  the  half  dozen  brigadier  generals  ap- 
pointed, including  the  notorious  James  Wilkinson,  not  a  single 
one  had  served  in  the  regular  army,  and  only  William  Hull, 
governor  of  the  Michigan  Territory,  had  actually  led  a  regiment 
in  battle.  The  generals  were  all  between  fifty-five  and  sixty- 
seven  years  of  age.  The  navy  which  we  had  to  oppose  to  Great 


258  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Britain's  800  ships  consisted  of  16  frigates,  brigs,  and  sloops 
of  war,  running  from  150  to  1500  tons,  and  only  3  carrying 
more  than  40  guns.  The  165  gunboats,  so  dear  to  Jefferson's 
heart,  were  of  some  little  use  in  defending  the  coast  in  still 
waters,  but  in  a  heavy  sea  they  were  in  danger  of  careening 
under  the  weight  of  their  single  gun!  "A  few  fir-built  frig- 
ates manned  by  bastards  and  outlaws"  was  a  London  journal's 
contemptuous  summary  of  our  navy.  Yet,  insignificant  as  our 
naval  force  was  in  comparison  with  Great  Britain's,  it  was  com- 
manded by  young,  enterprising,  and  intrepid  officers  like  Bain- 
bridge,  Isaac  Hull,  Decatur,  Lawrence,  and  Rodgers,  most  of 
whom  had  seen  service  in  the  Mediterranean  wars. 

Military  unpreparedness,  however,  was  only  one  of  the  hand- 
icaps under  which  we  entered  the  war  with  England.  Lack 
of  roads,  canals,  bridges,  causeways,  and  dredges  made  com- 
munication between  the  Atlantic  seaboard  and  the  trans- 
Allegheny  region  costly  and  difficult.  Munitions  and  supplies 
had  to  be  laboriously  transported  across  rivers,  swamps,  and 
wilderness.  Officers  were  distressed  to  keep  up  a  semblance 
of  morale  in  their  meager  armies,  half  mutinous  from  hunger 
and  cold.  The  factious  Congress  of  1811,  chiefly  to  vent  its 
spite  on  Gallatin,  had  refused  to  recharter  the  National  Bank 
and  had  thus  deprived  the  government  of  its  fiscal  agent  at 
just  the  moment  when  it  needed  it  most.  Forced  to  depend  on 
the  state  banks,  with  their  unregulated  issues  of  paper  and  the 
varying  credit  of  their  notes  in  the  different  sections  of  the 
country,  Gallatin  found  great  difficulty  in  placing  the  loan  of 
$11,000,000  which  Congress  had  been  induced  to  authorize  in 
March,  1812.  When  the  harassed  secretary  asked  for  the 
levy  of  internal  taxes,  the  House  rebuked  him  for  proposing 
"unrepublican  measures." 

Most  serious  of  all  the  handicaps  of  the  administration  was 
the  lack  of  that  national  spirit  of  cooperation  which  would 
easily  have  produced  men  and  money  in  abundance  to  win  the 
war.  Not  only  were  the  vast  majority  of  our  people  apathetic, 
but  whole  sections,  notably  New  England,  were  bitterly  opposed 
to  the  war.  When  the  declaration  was  voted,  thirty-four  con- 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  259 

gressmen  signed  a  vigorous  protest  which  was  circulated  all 
over  the  country.  The  Federalists  asserted  that  the  war  was 
precipitated  by  the  "Virginia  cabal"  and  the  "madmen  of 
Kentucky  and  Tennessee,"  for  the  sake  of  conquering  Canada 
and  ruining  the  flourishing  commerce  of  the  United  States.  It 
was  nothing  less  than  a  base  alliance  with  the  tyrant  Napoleon 
for  shattering  the  British  Empire.  Two  of  their  leaders  called 
on  the  British  minister  Foster  to  suggest  a  plan  for  commercial 
cooperation  and  said  openly  that  their  sole  hope  from  the  war 
was  that  it  would  "turn  out  the  administration"  and  leave 
the  Federalists  to  "make  a  solid  peace  with  Great  Britain."  The 
New  Englanders  hung  their  flags  at  half-mast  and  tolled  the 
bells  in  their  churches  when  war  was  declared.  The  governors 
of  Massachusetts,  Rhode  Island,  and  Connecticut  refused  to 
heed  the  President's  call  for  militia,  on  the  ground  that  the 
conditions,  as  prescribed  by  the  Constitution,  under  which  the 
militia  could  be  called  out  did  not  exist.1  With  more  than  half 
the  specie  of  the  country  in  her  bank  vaults,  New  England 
subscribed  for  less  than  $1,000,000  of  the  $11,000,000 
loan  of  1812,  and  during  the  entire  war  contributed  less  than 
$3,000,000  of  the  $41,000,000  paid  into  the  Treasury.  In 
addition  to  this  negative  policy  of  obstruction,  the  Northern 
and  Eastern  states  were  guilty  of  positively  treasonable  inter- 
course with  the  enemy  across  the  border.  "Two-thirds  of  the 
army  in  Canada,"  wrote  the  British  commissioner  Sir  George 
Provost  to  his  superior  in  London,  in  August,  1814,  "are  at 
this  moment  eating  beef  provided  by  the  American  contractors, 
drawn  principally  from  the  states  of  Vermont  and  New  York ; 
'.  .  .  large  droves  are  daily  crossing  the  lines,  coming  into 
Lower  Canada." 

1  Under  the  Constitution  (Art.  I,  sect.  8,  par.  15)  Congress  has  power  "to 
provide  for  calling  forth  the  militia  to  execute  the  laws  of  the  Union,  suppress 
insurrections,  and  repel  invasions."  As  if  the  declaration  of  war,  passed  by 
both  Houses  of  Congress  and  signed  by  the  President,  were  not  a  "law  of  the 
Union"!  The  governors,  supported  by  their  legislatures,  assumed  to  judge 
for  themselves  when  the  state  of  the  country  (or  at  least  their  part  of  it) 
needed  defending.  A  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court  in  1827  settled  the  question 
by  confirming  this  right  of  judgment  to  the  President. 


260  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

In  spite  of  an  enrolled  militia  of  nearly  700,000  men  in  the 
states,  less  than  10  per  cent  of  the  50,000  whom  Congress 
authorized  the  President  to  call  out  responded  at  the  beginning 
of  the  war.  In  spite  of  increased  pay  and  bounties  in  land  and 
money,  less  than  one  third  of  the  soldiers  provided  for  by  the 
regular-army  bill  were  recruited  in  the  summer  of  1812.  We 
had  over  1,000,000  male  white  citizens  of  military  age,  yet  the 
War  Department  could  never  put  an  army  of  more  than  10,000 
or  12,000  men  in  the  field  at  one  time.  From  the  close  of 
1813  to  the  end  of  the  war  the  effective  strength  of  our  forces 
varied  between  30,000  and  35,000  men.  Scanty  as  these  forces 
were,  they  were  generally  superior  to  the  number  of  Canadians 
and  Indians  who  could  be  marshaled  to  oppose  them  on  the 
Lakes  and  the  St.  Lawrence.  If  our  troops  had  had  proper 
commissariat  and  conveyance,  above  all  if  they  had  had  wise 
and  brave  leaders,  they  would  easily  have  carried  out  the  plan 
of  campaign,  which  was  to  drive  the  British  from  Upper  Canada, 
blockade  the  St.  Lawrence,  and  capture  Montreal.  The  Repub- 
lican politicians,  young  and  old,  had  no  doubt  of  the  speedy 
triumph  of  our  arms  on  land,  though  they  conceded  that  the 
British  navy  would  sweep  our  ships  from  the  ocean.  Clay 
boasted  that  the  riflemen  of  Kentucky  alone  would  conquer 
Canada,  and  Thomas  Jefferson  declared  that  the  advance  to 
Montreal  was  "only  a  question  of  marching." 

The  attack  on  Canada  was  to  be  delivered  at  four  points: 
from  Detroit  at  the  western  end  of  Lake  Erie,  along  the  Niagara 
River  at  the  eastern  end,  at  Kingston  (where  Lake  Ontario 
narrows  into  the  St.  Lawrence),  and  from  Lake  Champlain  down 
to  Montreal.  The  movement  of  the  American  armies  was  to  be 
from  west  to  east,  across  Upper  Canada  and  down  the  river.  The 
plan  failed  at  every  point.  General  Hull  was  making  a  laborious 
march  with  some  2000  men  through  the  forests  and  swamps  of 
western  Ohio  to  reach  the  important  fort  of  Detroit,  when  he 
learned  that  war  had  been  declared.  The  British  in  Canada  had 
received  the  news  before  him  and  had  captured  a  schooner  on 
Lake  Erie  in  which  Hull  had  risked  sending  ahead  his  baggage 
and  hospital  stores,  together  with  a  trunk  containing  papers 


THE  WAR  OF  1812  ON  THE  CANADIAN  BORDER 


262  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

relating  to  his  plan  of  campaign  and  the  rolls  of  his  troops. 
Soon  after  his  arrival  at  Detroit,  Hull  got  orders  from  Wash- 
ington to  invade  Canada  (July  9),  and  three  days  later  he 
crossed  the  Detroit  River,  with  a  pompous  and  threatening 
proclamation,  to  lay  siege  to  the  British  post  of  Maiden.  But 
the  march  through  the  Ohio  wilderness  seems  to  have  exhausted 
Hull's  energy.  He  pottered  around  Maiden,  while  his  own 
soldiers  grew  disgusted  and  his  adversary,  General  Isaac  Brock, 
collected  reinforcements  on  the  northern  shore  of  Lake  Erie.  As 
the  British  controlled  the  lake,  Hull's  only  hope  lay  in  a  rapid  and 
complete  victory  over  the  garrison  at  Maiden  before  help  could 
arrive.  Without  support  from  the  American  armies  to  the  east- 
ward, and  separated  by  two  hundred  miles  from  a  base  of  sup- 
plies to  the  southward,  he  was  in  a  trap.  When  he  heard  that  the 
American  garrison  at  Mackinaw  had  surrendered  and  that  Brit- 
ish reinforcements  were  on  the  way  to  Maiden  from  the  east,  he 
hastily  abandoned  the  siege  and  recrossed  the  river  to  Detroit. 
Even  when  back  in  the  fort  with  plenty  of  ammunition  and  over 
1000  effective  defenders,  Hull  failed  to  regain  his  courage.  He 
sank  into  a  mood  of  apathy  and  dejection,  brooding  over  the 
imaginary  picture  of  Indian  hordes  descending  on  Detroit  with 
torch  and  tomahawk.  When  Brock,  with  only  700  men,  crossed 
over  to  the  American  side  of  the  Detroit  River  (August  16)  and 
prepared  to  assault  the  fort,  he  was  astonished  to  see  a  mes- 
senger approaching  his  lines  with  a  white  flag.  Hull  surren- 
dered the  fort  and  his  entire  army  without  striking  a  blow. 
The  fall  of  Detroit  meant  the  loss  of  the  entire  Northwest.1 
The  American  military  frontier  receded  at  once  from  the  Missis- 
sippi to  the  Wabash,  and  the  American  army  marched  through 
Upper  Canada  as  prisoners  of  war  and  not  as  conquering  heroes. 
General  Hull  was  tried  by  court-martial,  found  guilty  of  cow- 
ardice, and  condemned  to  be  shot.  But  President  Madison 
pardoned  him  on  account  of  his  services  in  the  Revolution— 
and  his  gray  hairs. 

1The  day  before  Hull's  surrender,  and  by  his  order,  Fort  Dearborn  at  the 
foot  of  Lake  Michigan  was  evacuated.  The  garrison  was  massacred  by  the 
Indians  in  the  process. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  263 

The  success  of  the  plan  for  the  invasion  of  Canada  depended 
on  the  cooperation  of  the  armies  at  both  ends  of  Lake  Erie 
and  on  the  St.  Lawrence.  But  there  was  no  agreement  between 
the  administration  at  Washington  and  the  senior  major  general. 
Dearborn,  who  should  have  been  operating  at  Niagara  to  sup- 
port Hull  by  preventing  the  British  from  transporting  reen- 
forcements  up  Lake  Erie  to  Maiden,  was  at  Boston  on  the  day 
of  Hull's  surrender,  debating  with  himself  whether  he  had  better 
stay  on  the  Atlantic  seaboard  or  go  to  the  Lakes.  He  had 
ordered  a  suspension  of  hostilities  in  order  that  a  plan  of  armi- 
stice, suggested  by  the  British  when  the  news  of  the  repeal  of 
the  Orders  in  Council  reached  America,  might  be  discussed. 
When  operations  were  renewed  on  the  Niagara  River,  Hull's 
fate  was  already  sealed,  and  Brock's  forces  were  released  for 
service  at  the  eastern  end  of  Lake  Erie.  There  General  Stephen 
Van  Rensselaer  of  the  New  York  militia  and  General  Alexander 
Smythe  of  the  regular  army,  instead  of  joining  cordially  for  an 
effective  attack,  quarreled  as  to  the  time,  the  place,  and  the 
method  of  gaining  the  Canadian  shore.  Van  Rensselaer  led  a 
little  body  of  regulars  across  the  river  (October  13)  and  seized 
Queenstown  Heights,  but  the  New  York  militia  refused  to  leave 
the  state  and  complacently  watched  the  rout  of  the  regulars 
by  a  superior  Canadian  force.  Smythe  then  took  his  turn,  very 
fierce  in  proclamation  and  very  tame  in  action.  Aside  from  a 
morning  raid  off  Black'  Rock,  in  which  he  captured  a  few 
British  guns  and  partially  destroyed  a  bridge,  all  his  bluster 
resulted  in  nothing.  Whenever  he  considered  an  embarkment, 
the  inadequacy  of  his  force  appalled  him.  Early  in  December 
he  decided  to  go  into  winter  quarters.  Peter  B.  Porter  publicly 
accused  Smythe  of  cowardice,  and  the  men  fought  a  duel — after 
their  seconds  had  taken  the  balls  out  of  the  pistols.  It  was 
in  accordance  with  the  general  opera  bouffe  on  the  Niagara. 
Out  of  4000  American  troops  gathered  there  in  the  autumn  of 
1812,  not  1000  could  be  persuaded  to  cross  the  river. 

Dearborn  himself,  with  a  force  as  large  as  Hull's  and 
Smythe's  combined,  was  in  command  on  Lake  Champlain,  in- 
tending to  march  down  on  Montreal  as  Smythe  attacked  at 


264  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Niagara.  On  November  19  he  marched  to  the  Canadian  line, 
which  his  militia  refused  to  cross,  and  four  days  later  he 
marched  back  to  Plattsburg.  Hull,  Van  Rensselaer,  and  Smythe 
had  at  least  set  some  soldiers  on  Canadian  soil,  but  the  senior 
major  general  could  only  march  his  army  twenty  miles  and 
back,  like  the  King  of  France  in  the  jingle.  "He  was  laughed 
at,"  wrote  George  Hay,  "by  both  Federalists  and  Republicans, 
and  should  have  gone  the  way  to  retirement  along  with  Hull 
and  Smythe,  to  make  room  for  better  men."  But  it  took  more 
than  a  calamity  to  nerve  Madison  to  make  a  dismissal. 

A  pleasing  contrast  to  this  dismal  record  of  our  armies  on  the 
Canadian  frontier  was  furnished  by  the  exploits  of  our  little 
navy  in  the  first  six  months  of  the  war.  Three  days  after  his 
uncle  had  disgracefully  surrendered  Detroit  (August  19)  Cap- 
tain Isaac  Hull,  in  the  44-gun  frigate  Constitution,  met  the 
British  brig  Guerriere  (38  guns)  in  the  north  Atlantic,  and  in 
a  spirited  battle  of  half  an  hour  reduced  her  to  a  floating  hulk 
of  wreckage.  When  the  news  of  Hull's  victory  reached  Boston 
it  sent  a  wave  of  enthusiasm  through  the  country.  It  mattered 
little  that  the  American  frigate  was  superior  in  every  way  to 
her  adversary ;  the  important  thing  was  that  a  British  warship, 
whose  captain  had  been  active  in  impressing  sailors  from  our 
merchantmen  and  had  spread  on  the  log  of  his  plundered  vic- 
tims a  taunting  challenge  to  any  American  frigate,  had  struck 
its  colors.  The  days  of  John  Paul  Jones  had  returned.  Our 
captains  hastened  to  sea  to  emulate  the  deed  of  Hull.  In 
October  the  i8-gun  sloop  Wasp  made  prize  of  the  equally 
matched  Frolic,  convoying  -a  British  West  Indian  fleet,  600 
miles  east  of  Norfolk.  A  few  days  later  the  United  States, 
commanded  by  Decatur,  defeated  the  Macedonian  off  the 
Azores  and  brought  her  into  New  London — the  only  British 
warship  ever  brought  into  an  American  port  as  a  prize.  In 
December  Captain  Bainbridge,  in  the  Constitution,  destroyed 
the  Java  off  the  coast  of  Brazil,  the  British  and  American 
frigates  being  equally  matched  in  size,  guns,  and  crew.  In  six 
months  the  Americans  had  forced  three  British  frigates  and 
two  sloops  of  war  to  strike  their  colors,  while  they  themselves 


lllllllllllll 


266  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

had  lost  nothing  larger  than  the  i8-gun  Wasp.1  Our  privateers 
had  taken  over  300  British  merchantmen  in  seven  months.  Of 
course,  the  loss  of  four  or  five  warships  was  of  small  conse- 
quence to  the  great  British  navy;  but  the  American  victories 
had  the  moral  effect  of  stimulating  our  flagging  zeal  and  the 
practical  effect  of  keeping  the  British  cruisers  away  from  our 
ports  just  when  the  large  fleet  of  merchantmen  which  had  sailed 
from  England  on  the  repeal  of  the  Orders  in  Council,  and  before 
the  news  of  the  declaration  of  war  had  reached  Europe,  were 
bringing  millions  of  dollars'  worth  of  imports  to  strengthen  our 
impoverished  treasury. 

The  news  of  these  victories  did  not  arrive  in  time  to  affect  the 
election  of  1812,  in  which  Madison  defeated  his  rival,  De  Witt 
Clinton,  by  the  not  very  ample  margin  of  128  votes  to  89. 
The  Federalists  made  large  gains  in  New  England  and  New 
York,  electing  double  the  number  of  representatives  that  they 
had  sent  to  the  famous  Twelfth  Congress.  The  new  Congress, 
called  in  extra  session  in  May,  1813,  was  obliged  by  the  press- 
ing needs  of  the  war  to  put  behind  it  the  whole  Jeffersonian 
policy  of  the  abolition  of  internal  taxes  and  to  levy  duties  on  car- 
riages, auction  sales,  sugar,  salt,  wines,  and  liquors,  besides 
apportioning  a  direct  tax  of  $3,000,000  among  the  states  and 
imposing  a  stamp  tax  on  notes  and  bills  of  exchange.  The 
expenses  of  the  government  had  mounted  to  $16,000,000  for 
the  six  months  preceding  the  call  of  Congress,  and  it  was  esti- 
mated that  $27,000,000  more  would  be  needed  to  see  the  year 
1813  through.  To  supplement  the  revenue  from  tariff  and 
internal  taxes,  Congress  authorized  a  loan  of  $7,500,000.  All 
these  financial  measures  had  been  carefully  prepared  by  Gal- 
latin  before  he  sailed  for  Europe  on  a  mission  which  we  shall 
notice  presently,  and  were  passed  by  respectable  majorities. 
The  government  was  obliged  to  struggle  on,  as  best  it  could, 
with  loans  and  taxes  and  the  emission  of  Treasury  notes,  while 
our  import  trade  sank,  under  the  increasing  severity  of  the 

*A  few  hours  after  the  Wasp's  victory  over  the  Frolic  the  74-gun  British  ship 
Poictiers  had  hove  in  sight  and  taken  both  the  victor  and  her  prize  into 
Bermuda. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  267 

British  blockade,  from  $77,000,000  in  1812  to  $22,000,000  in 
1813  and  $13,000,000  in  1814. 

The  military  campaigns  of  the  spring  and  summer  of  1813 
showed  no  more  cause  for  congratulation  than  those  of  the 
year  before.  There  was  the  same  tale  of  dilatoriness,  discord, 
and  disaster.  A  detachment  of  Kentuckians,  foolishly  pushing 
ahead  of  General  Harrison's  army,  were  defeated  at  French- 
town,  a  few  miles  south  of  Detroit,  January  22,  1813,  and  their 
wounded,  left  behind  by  the  British  general  Procter  without 
a  guard,  were  horribly  massacred  in  the  night  by  a  band  of 
drunken  Indians.  James  Wilkinson  and  Wade  Hampton  re- 
placed Van  Rensselaer  and  Smythe  at  the  Niagara  front,  whik 
General  Dearborn  went  into  retirement.  But  Wilkinson  and 
Hampton,  who  regarded  each  other  with  a  mixture  of  jealousy 
and  contempt,  failed  as  signally  as  Dearborn  to  make  any  ad- 
vance on  Montreal,  and  went  into  winter  quarters  with  nothing 
to  show  but  wasted  time  and  mutual  recriminations  for  their 
so-called  campaigns.  The  general  gloom  was  deepened  by  a 
calamity  which  checked  the  victorious  career  of  our  frigates. 
On  June  i  Captain  Lawrence,  in  the  ill-fated  Chesafiake,  met 
the  British  frigate  Shannon  (Captain  Brook)  outside  Boston 
Harbor.  In  an  engagement  of  fifteen  minutes  the  Chesapeake 
suffered  the  fate  of  the  Guerriere,  and  Lawrence  was  carried  be- 
low decks  mortally  wounded  and  vainly  pleading  with  his  dying 
breath,  " Don't  give  up  the  ship!" 

New  British  cruisers  arrived  off  our  coast,  drawing  a  strin- 
gent blockade  from  New  London  southward.  The  frigates 
United  States,  Constellation,  Macedonian,  and  Adams  were 
penned  up  in  our  ports,  the  Constitution  was  undergoing  repairs, 
the  President  and  the  Essex  were  at  sea,  the  Congress  was  con- 
demned, and  all  our  brigs  except  the  Enterprise  were  captured. 
By  the  autumn  of  1813  we  had  not  a  single  ship  patrolling  our 
coast,  and  the  British  landed  where  they  would.  Exports  from 
New  York  fell  from  over  $12,000,000  in  1811  to  $200,000 
in  1814,  and  those  of  Virginia  from  $4,800,000  to  $17,500. 
From  Long  Island  Sound  to  the  Savannah  River  foreign  trade 
virtually  ceased. 


268  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  one  redeeming  exploit  of  American  arms  in  the  year 
1813  was  the  recovery  of  the  Northwest.  Hull's  surrender  of 
Detroit  had  shamed  and  frightened  the  Western  states  into  an 
unwonted  display  of  energy,  as  it  let  loose  the  Indian  menace 
and  brought  the  scalping  parties  to  within  thirty  miles  of 
Louisville.  The  Kentuckians  raised  over  10,000  volunteers. 
The  governor  of  the  state  appointed  the  hero  of  Tippecanoe 
the  major  general  of  its  militia.  Only  twelve  days  after  the  fall 
of  Detroit,  Harrison  started  northward  from  Cincinnati,  with 
the  largest  army  ever  mustered  in  the  United  States  west  of  the 
Alleghenies,  to  recapture  the  fort.  The  Navy  Department,  now 
at  last  fully  awake  to  the  importance  of  controlling  Lake  Erie, 
set  Commodore  Chauncey  at  work  to  construct  a  fleet  at 
Presqu'ile  (Erie).  Here  he  was  joined  at  the  end  of  March, 
1813,  by  Captain  Oliver  H.  Perry  of  Newport,  a  young  veteran 
of  the  French  war  of  1798  and  the  Tripolitan  war  of  1803.  By 
midsummer  Perry  had  built  and  launched  five  ships  at  Pres- 
qu'ile, sending  as  far  as  Buffalo  and  Pittsburgh  for  material  and 
equipment,  and  had  dexterously  conveyed  to  the  same  port  five 
other  vessels,  which  had  been  penned  up  in  the  Niagara  River 
by  the  British  guns  at  Fort  Erie.  On  August  5  Perry  got  his 
squadron  across  the  bar  in  front  of  the  harbor  of  Presqu'ile 
and  sailed  up  the  lake  to  a  point  off  the  mouth  of  the  Sandusky 
River,  on  which  Harrison  was  encamped.  His  shortage  in  men 
was  remedied  by  the  dispatch  of  100  Kentuckians  from 
Harrison's  army  to  serve  on  the  fleet.  He  had  two  brigs  of  20 
tons  each,  the  flagship  Lawrence,  and  the  Niagara,  while  his 
smaller  craft  carried  from  i  to  4  guns  each.  His  opponent, 
Captain  Barclay,  who  had  served  with  Nelson  at  Trafalgar,  had 
six  vessels,  carrying  altogether  63  guns  to  Perry's  57.  But  the 
American  guns  were  much  heavier,  throwing  a  broadside  of 
900  Ib.  of  metal  to  500  for  the  British.  The  two  fleets  met 
in  Put-in-Bay,  September  10,  1813,  and  after  a  furious  fight 
of  three  hours  every  one  of  the  British  ships  had  struck  her 
colors.  The  battle  was  decided  by  as  brave  a  deed  as  is  written 
in  the  annals  of  our  navy.  When  Perry's  flagship,  the  Lawrence, 
bearing  the  brunt  of  the  British  attack,  was  reduced  to  a  total 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  269 

wreck,  Perry  went  over  her  side  into  a  small  boat  and,  bearing 
the  blue  flag  inscribed  with  the  immortal  words  "Don't  give  up 
the  ship,"  was  rowed,  under  the  fire  of  the  British  guns,  to  the 
Niagara,  which  had  been  fighting  at  long  range  on  the  edge  of 
the  battle.  Perry  brought  the  Niagara  into  the  midst  of  the 
fight  and,  passing  between  the  British  ships,  swept  them  with 
both  broadsides  at  once  until  they  struck.  Before  the  smoke 
of  battle  had  cleared  away,  Perry  sent  the  good  news  to 
Harrison  in  the  famous  dispatch,  "We  have  met  the  enemy 
and  they  are  ours:  two  ships,  two  brigs,  one  schooner,  and 
one  sloop." 

Perry's  victory  compelled  the  British  general  Procter  to 
abandon  Detroit  and  Maiden  and  fall  back  toward  the  eastern 
end  of  the  lake,  to  the  great  disgust  of  Tecumseh  and  his 
Indians.  Harrison's  troops,  conveyed  across  the  lake  to  the 
Canadian  side,  entered  Maiden  only  three  days  after  Procter 
had  abandoned  it.  They  pursued  the  British  eastward  along  the 
road  to  Lake  Ontario,  overtaking  them  at  Moravian  Town  on 
the  Thames.  There  Richard  M.  Johnson's  mounted  Ken- 
tuckians  drove  through  the  British  ranks  along  the  river  road, 
while  the  rest  cleared  the  Indians  out  of  the  swamp  and  forest 
lands  on  the  flank.  Procter  barely  escaped  capture  'after  a 
precipitous  flight,  and  the  great  Tecumseh  was  among  the  slain. 
The  battle  of  the  Thames,  with  Perry's  victory  on  Lake  Erie, 
restored  the  province  lost  by  Hull.  Detroit  was  again  in  Amer- 
ican hands;  the  British  army  abandoned  Upper  Canada  be- 
tween the  Lakes;  the  Indian  menace  on  our  borders  was 
removed;  and  the  country  west  of  the  Niagara  River  was 
undisturbed  for  the  remainder  of  the  war. 

In  the  spring  of  1814  Hampton  and  Wilkinson  followed  Hull, 
Smythe,  Van  Rensselaer,  and  Dearborn  into  retirement,  and 
the  northern  theater  of  war  was  cleared  of  all  the  incompetent, 
swaggering,  wrangling  generals  to  make  room  for  a  group  of 
energetic  and  able  commanders.  George  Izard,  a  highly  trained 
engineer,  and  Jacob  Brown,  a  Quaker  but  the  best  fighter  of 
the  war  except  Andrew  Jackson,  were  appointed  major  gen- 
erals, with  Winfield  Scott  and  Peter  B.  Porter  among  the  six 


270  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

new  brigadiers.  The  effects  of  the  change  were  soon  visible. 
Brown's  army  of  5500  crossed  the  Niagara  on  July  3,  and,  on 
the  fifth,  Scott's  brigade  in  a  splendid  action  at  Chippewa  drove 
the  superior  British  force  from  the  field.  Three  weeks  later 
Brown  waged  a  furious  battle  from  mid-afternoon  till  far  into 
the  night  a  few  miles  down  the  river,  at  Lundy's  Lane,  driving 
the  British  again  and  again  from  their  guns.  Darkness  and  the 
exhaustion  of  his  troops  finally  forced  Brown  to  retire  from 
the  field,  leaving  the  British  technically  the  victors.  But  the 
losses  in  Drummond's  army  of  3000  were  heavier  than  those 
of  Brown's  2000;  and  when,  after  a  period  of  recuperation, 
Drummond  marched  up  the  river  to  assault  Fort  Erie,  he  met 
the  same  stubborn  resistance  from  officers  and  soldiers,  for 
whom  at  last  the  British  troops  began  to  have  an  awesome 
respect.  Four  times  within  six  weeks  the  Americans  with  in- 
ferior numbers  beat  off  his  attacks.  He  was  in  full  retreat 
toward  Chippewa  when  the  Americans  finally  blew  up  the  works 
at  Fort  Erie  and  retired  to  their  own  side  of  the  river  (Novem- 
ber 5,  1814).  The  actual  results  achieved  by  Brown's  campaign 
were  not  great,  but  the  moral  effect  on  the  country  of  a  com- 
mander who  could  train  and  inspire  American  troops  was 
immense — especially  as  it  came  at  a  time  of  deep  discourage- 
ment, when  our  Treasury  was  nearly  empty,  our  ports  block- 
aded, our  ships  penned  up,  our  shores  ravaged,  our  Capitol 
burned,  and  our  Union  in  imminent  danger  of  letting  its  power 
revert  by  default  to  the  states  which  had  created  it. 

Nor  was  Brown's  heroic  campaign  the  only  redeeming  fea- 
ture of  the  year  1814.  While  the  Americans  were  crossing  the 
Niagara  to  Chippewa  and  Lundy's  Lane,  large  reinforcements 
from  Wellington's  army  in  the  Spanish  peninsula  were  on  their 
way  to  Canada.1  Sir  George  Prevost,  with  a  larger  and  finer 
army  than  Burgoyne  had  commanded,  crossed  the  Canadian 

1  Napoleon  had  been  driven  back  to  the  French  side  of  the  Rhine  by  his 
crushing  defeat  at  Leipzig  (October  16-19,  1813),  and  his  armies  expelled  from 
Spain  by  Wellington's  victory  at  Vitoria  (June  21,  1813).  Over  10,000  trained 
British  troops,  released  from  service  against  the  Corsican,  were  dispatched  to 
America  to  finish  up  the  war. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  271 

frontier  early  in  September  and  set  out  toward  Lake  Champlain 
to  repeat  with  better  success  Burgoyne's  march  of  1777.  So 
confident  was  Prevost  that  he  never  broke  his  columns  to  de- 
ploy. The  few  American  skirmishers  who  annoyed  his  march 
he  ignored.  Arrived  before  the  strong  redoubts  which  Izard 
had  built  just  south  of  Plattsburg,  he  waited  for  the  British 
fleet  on  Lake  Champlain  to  enter  Plattsburg  Bay  and  cooperate 
in  the  assault.  The  British  fleet  was  no  less  confident  than  the 
army.  Besides  the  Con  fiance,  of  37  guns  and  a  crew  of  300 
men,  the  British  had  three  brigs  and  twelve  gunboats.  The 
American  fleet,  under  Lieutenant  MacDonough,  a  young  man 
of  thirty  but  a  veteran  of  the  Tripolitan  wars,  was  nearly  equal 
in  the  number  of  ships,  but  inferior  in  armament.  To  Mac- 
Donough's  45  long-range  guns,  throwing  a  weight  of  759  lb., 
the  British  fleet  could  oppose  60  guns,  with  a  broadside  of 
1128  lb.  MacDonough  placed  his  ships  across  the  entrance 
to  the  bay  in  such  a  way  as  to  force  the  British  to  fight  at  close 
range.  When  his  flagship,  the  Saratoga,  had  been  apparently 
silenced  by  her  powerful  rival,  the  Confiance,  MacDonough 
swung  her  completely  around  by  a  clever  device  of  springs 
in  her  cables  and  brought  her  unused  batteries  to  bear.  The 
Confiance  struck  her  colors,  and  the  three  smaller  ships  were 
soon  obliged  to  follow  suit.  MacDonough's  victory  was  com- 
plete. The  next  day  (September  12)  Prevost,  unable  to  pro- 
ceed, with  the  Americans  in  command  of  the  lake,  led  his  10,000 
back  to  Canada. 

MacDonough's  victory  on  Lake  Champlain  was  the  most 
timely  stroke  of  good  fortune  in  the  war.  When  the  incredible 
news  of  it  reached  England  in  October,  it  dampened  the  ardor 
with  which  the  press  had  clamored  all  summer  for  the  annihila- 
tion of  the  "contemptible  army"  across  the  sea.  When  the 
news  reached  Ghent,  where  the  British  and  American  com- 
missioners had  been  trying  to  negotiate  a  peace  since  early 
August,  it  heartened  our  envoys  to  stand  by  their  demand  for 
a  treaty  which  should  not  sacrifice  a  foot  of  American  territory. 

At  home  too  the  victory  came  as  a  solace  in  the  midst  of 
humiliations;  for  the  public  buildings  at  Washington  were  in 


272  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ashes,  and  the  British  had  "annexed"  the  coast  of  Maine  from 
Passamaquoddy  Bay  to  the  Penobscot,  with  the  acquiescence 
of  the  inhabitants.  In  June,  1814,  Major  General  Ross  had 
landed,  with  4000  troops  from  Wellington's  peninsular  army,  to 
cooperate  with  Admiral  Cockburn,  a  coarse,  vindictive  officer, 
whose  landing  parties  for  a  year  had  been  burning  towns  and 
pillaging  farms  along  our  blockaded  coast.  As  a  culminating 
act  of  their  marauding  expeditions,  the  British  landed  on  the 
west  bank  of  the  Patuxent  River  and  marched  unhindered  to 
Bladensburg,  seven  miles  from  Washington.  The  capital  was 
absolutely  undefended.  General  Winder,  the  officer  in  com- 
mand, was  without  council,  courage,  or  resource.  About  7000 
green  militia  were  hastily  gathered  to  oppose  the  British 
advance,  but  they  broke  and  ran  at  the  first  attack  of  Ross's 
troops  at  Bladensburg  (August  24),  only  a  few  hundred  marines 
under  Commodore  Barney  redeeming  the  honor  of  the  Amer- 
ican uniform  by  a  brave  but  futile  resistance.  The  disgraceful 
affair  was  dubbed  "the  Bladensburg  races."  That  evening  the 
British  entered  the  city,  after  Madison  had  fled  for  refuge  to 
the  Virginia  woods,  and  set  fire  to  the  public  buildings.  Only 
heavy  thunderstorms  which  broke  that  night  and  the  next  day 
saved  the  city  from  total  destruction.1  From  Washington  the 
British  sailed  up  Chesapeake  Bay  to  repeat  their  depredations 
on  the  important  commercial  town  of  Baltimore.  But  their 
troops  were  repulsed  before  the  redoubts  of  the  town  in  a  battle 
in  which  General  Ross  lost  his  life,  and  their  fleet,  kept  out  of 
range  by  sunken  hulks,  after  vainly  trying  in  an  all-night  bom- 
bardment to  lower  the  Star-Spangled  Banner,  which  was  float- 
ing over  Fort  McHenry,  headed  down  the  bay  for  the  capes 
(September  14,  1814).  This  was  two  days  after  General 

aThis  exhibition  of  vandalism  in  Washington  was  in  retaliation  for  the  burn- 
ing, by  an  American  raiding  party,  of  the  government  buildings  at  York,  Ontario. 
But  the  latter  act  was  perpetrated  by  an  irresponsible  mob,  while  the  burning 
of  Washington  was  ordered  by  a  vice  admiral  in  the  British  navy.  The  prince 
regent  complimented  Ross  on  this  "enterprise  so  creditable  to  his  Majesty's 
arms  and  so  well  calculated  to  humble  the  presumption  of  the  American  govern- 
ment .  .  .  which  has  involved  that  country  in  an  unnecessary  and  unjust  war 
against  his  Ma'ty." 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  273 

Prevost  had  begun  his  retreat  to  Canada  and  three  days  before 
General  Drummond  failed  in  his  assault  on  Brown's  garrison 
at  Fort  Erie. 

The  same  September  of  1814  saw  an  important  campaign  in 
the  Southwest.  Florida  belonged  to  England's  ally,  Spain.  Its 
conquest  was  the  object  of  the  militia  of  Tennessee  and  Georgia, 
just  as  the  conquest  of  Canada  was  the  aim  of  the  Northern 
armies.  Soon  after  the  war  broke  out,  Andrew  Jackson,  a  major 
general  of  the  Tennessee  militia,  set  out  with  2000  men  against 
"the  lower  country."  The  government  at  Washington,  how- 
ever, was  not  yet  ready  to  precipitate  war  with  Spain.  To  his 
great  disgust  Jackson  was  recalled,  and  the  next  year  our  troops 
were  withdrawn  from  Amelia  Island,  a  Spanish  possession  off 
the  coast  of  Florida,  which  General  Matthews  had  seized  in 
March,  1812.  The  Tennesseeans  and  Georgians,  however,  only 
awaited  the  opportunity  to  renew  the  attack  on  Florida,  and  that 
opportunity  was  furnished  by  the  behavior  of  the  Creek  Indians 
in  our  Mississippi  territory,  who  had  been  stirred  up  by  English 
and  Spanish  agents  from  Florida,  and  still  more  by  a  visit  from 
the  great  Shawnee  chieftain  Tecumseh.  These  "Red  Sticks," 
as  the  hostile  Creeks  were  called,  took  up  the  hatchet  in  the 
summer  of  1813  and  massacred  250  whites  in  Fort  Mimms  on 
the  lower  Alabama.  After  a  hard  campaign  of  a  year,  in  which 
he  had  to  contend  with  hunger  and  incipient  mutiny  in  his  own 
ranks,  as  well  as  with  the  treacherous  Indians,  Jackson  com- 
pletely broke  the  power  of  the  hostile  Creeks  and  compelled 
them  to  sign  the  treaty  of  Fort  Jackson  (August  9,  1814),  by 
which  they  relinquished  to  the  United  States  two  thirds  of  their 
lands  in  Alabama.  The  Mississippi  territory  thus  cleared  of  the 
Indian  danger,  Jackson  (who  was  promoted  to  a  major  general- 
ship in  the  regular  army  and  given  command  of  the  military 
district  of  the  Southwest)  pushed  on  to  drive  the  Spanish  power 
from  the  shores  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  He  occupied  Mobile 
(August  15),  and  after  repelling  the  attack  of  a  British  squad 
on  Fort  Bowyer  at  the  mouth  of  Mobile  Bay,  he  marched  across 
the  Perdido  into  East  Florida  and  raised  the  American  flag  over 
the  fort  at  Pensacola  (November  7). 


274  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

But  Jackson  was  doomed  to  wait  another  three  years  before 
completing  his  conquest  of  East  Florida.  Already  while  he  was 
at  Mobile,  Monroe,  who  had  succeeded  Armstrong  in  the  War 
Department  after  the  raid  on  Washington,  sent  him  word  that 
a  formidable  British  expedition  was  preparing  for  an  attack 
at  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi.  It  was  composed  of  Ross's 
troops,  summoned  from  Chesapeake  Bay,  fresh  regiments  from 
the  Peninsular  Army,  and  West  Indians  and  negroes,  amount- 
ing in  all  to  some  10,000  men.  The  expedition  was  to  rendez- 
vous at  Jamaica  on  November  20,  under  the  command  of 
Wellington's  brother-in-law,  Sir  Edward  Pakenham.  Generous 
provisions  were  made  for  Jackson  in  men  and  money,  and  he 
was  urged  by  repeated  messages  from  Monroe  that  New  Orleans 
was  the  danger 'point.  But  Jackson's  heart  was  set  on  the  con- 
quest of  Florida.  He  tarried  at  Mobile  until  the  eve  of  the 
departure  of  the  British  expedition  from  Jamaica,  and,  turning 
at  last  westward,  reached  New  Orleans  only  twelve  days  before 
Pakenham's  advance  troops  entered  Lake  Borgne,  captured  the 
American  gunboats,  and  made  possible  a  landing  on  the  shores 
of  the  lake  only  fifteen  miles  from  the  city.  Not  a  breastwork 
had  been  erected  for  the  defense  of  New  Orleans.  Jackson's 
troops  were  still  unconcentrated.  If  the  British  had  proceeded 
immediately  to  the  attack,  New  Orleans  must  have  fallen.  As 
it  was,  Colonel  Thornton  advanced  with  1600  men  to  within 
seven  miles  of  the  helpless  city.  But  his  superior,  General 
Keane,  decided  to  wait  for  Pakenham  to  arrive  and  assume 
direction  of  the  campaign.  Jackson  rose  to  the  dangerous 
situation  with  magnificent  energy  and  courage.  He  concen- 
trated his  troops,  constructed  his  lines  of  defense,  located  his 
guns,  and  disposed  his  forces  with  a  promptness  and  skill  which 
excited  the  admiration  of  his  adversaries.  He  seemed  to  divine 
every  movement  of  the  British  and  was  alert  to  take  advantage 
of  every  weakness  in  their  position.  When  Pakenham  with 
great  difficulty  had  got  his  heavy  guns  transported  across  the 
marshlands  and  set  up  against  the  American  batteries,  Jackson 
silenced  them  in  an  artillery  battle  on  New  Year's  Day,  1815, 
in  which  he  showed  superior  tactics  and  marksmanship.  A  week 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  275 

later  Pakenham  threw  his  5500  veterans  against  Jackson's 
works  in  a  frontal  attack,  only  to  see  them  mown  down  like 
wheat  by  the  unerring  fire  of  the  Kentucky  and  Tennessee 
riflemen.  The  victors  of  Vitoria  broke  and  ran.  Pakenham  was 
killed  by  a  grapeshot.  Gibbs  and  Keane,  the  officers  next  in 
command,  were  struck  down.  Only  Lambert  of  the  major 
generals  was  left  to  conduct  the  retreat.  The  British  losses  on 
that  famous  January  8,  1815,  were  2036  men  as  against  71 
for  Jackson.  The  shattered  British  army  reembarked  on  Lake 
Borgne  and  sailed  away  to  the  eastward.  Jackson  entered  the 
city  of  New  Orleans  on  the  twenty-first,  acclaimed  by  shouts  of 
triumph,  which  were  echoed  fourteen  years  later  from  the  east 
front  of  the  White  House,  when  the,  "hero  of  New  Orleans"  was 
inaugurated  president  of  the  United  States. 

Had  the  Atlantic  cable  been  in  existence  then,  the  battle  of 
New  Orleans  would  not  have  been  fought,  for  the  evening  be- 
fore Pakenham  arrived  to  take  command  of  the  operations  on 
the  Mississippi  the  British  and  American  commissioners  at 
Ghent  had  signed  a  treaty  of  peace  (December  24,  1814). 
From  the  moment  England  repealed  her  Orders  in  Council 
(five  days  after  the  declaration  of  war)  there  had  been  dis- 
cussions of  peace.  Jonathan  Russell,  our  charge  d'affaires  in 
London,  approached  Lord  Castlereagh,  and  at  the  same  time 
the  British  admiral  Warren  wrote  from  Halifax  to  Monroe  on 
the  subject  of  an  armistice  in  September,  1812.  But  Monroe 
replied  to  Warren  that  an  abandonment  of  the  right  of  im- 
pressment was  an  " indispensable  condition"  of  peace,  and 
Castlereagh  replied  to  Russell  that  England  would  never 
abandon  that  "ancient  and  accustomed  practice."  Then  Czar 
Alexander  of  Russia,  who  had  brought  the  wrath  of  Napoleon 
down  on  his  head  by  refusing  to  adhere  to  the  Continental 
System,  intervened  to  secure  the  full  cooperation  of  his  new 
ally  England.  .In  September,  1812,  his  chancellor  offered  the 
friendly  mediation  of  Russia  to  our  minister  at  St.  Petersburg, 
John  Quincy  Adams.  Madison  hastened  to  accept  this  offer 
in  the  spring  of  1813  and  appointed  Secretary  Gallatin  and 
Senator  Bayard  of  Delaware  to  join  Adams  in  the  negotiations 


276  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

at  the  Russian  capital.  They  sailed  in  May.  Castlereagh, 
however,  declined  the  Czar's  offer  of  mediation,  indicating  his 
willingness  to  treat  directly  with  American  commissioners  at 
London,  or  at  Gothenburg,  Sweden.  Again  Madison  welcomed 
the  invitation  and  added  the  names  of  Henry  Clay  and  Jonathan 
Russell  to  the  group  of  envoys  (January  14,  I8I4).1  Our  for- 
tunes were  very  low  in  1814.  Our  victories  on  the  sea  had 
ceased,  and  our  navy  was  fast  disappearing  from  the  ocean. 
There  was  disharmony  in  the  cabinet  and  great  discontent  in  the 
country.  Our  foreign  trade  was  almost  annihilated.  The  cur- 
rency was  in  the  gravest  disorder.  The  country's  specie  was 
rapidly  accumulating  in  New  England,  where  disaffection  with 
the  war  was  at  its  height.  TJie  Treasury  asked  for  $40,000,000, 
a  sum  greater  than  the  total  issue  of  bank  notes  in  the  country. 
No  effort  availed  to  raise  the  voluntary  enlistments  above 
35,000  men,  which  seemed  a  petty  number  when  compared 
with  the  forces  which  England  was  preparing  to  send  over  on 
the  final  defeat  of  Napoleon.  When,  therefore,  the  commis- 
sioners met  at  Ghent,  in  the  Netherlands,  to  begin  negotiations 
(August  8,  1814),  the  cards  in  the  hands  of  our  envoys  were 
pretty  poor.  In  London,  on  the  other  hand,  there  was  con- 
fidence. The  allies  were  in  Paris.  Napoleon  had  abdicated. 
The  British  war  office  was  preparing  the  expedition  which  was 
to  chastise  the  Americans  into  submission,  and  the  English 
press  was  heaping  insults  on  the  "despot"  Madison,  the  "con- 
temptible tool  of  Bonaparte." 

The  instructions  to  the  British  envoys  at  Ghent  reflected  the 
spirit  of  the  country.  The  Americans  must  cede  land  in  Maine 
and  upper  New  York  to  give  the  British  direct  connections 
between  Halifax  and  Quebec  and  the  control  of  both  banks  of 


1  Gallatin,  after  his  departure  for  St.  Petersburg,  was  rejected  by  the  Senate,  on 
the  ground  that  he  could  not  combine  a  cabinet  office  with  a  diplomatic  mission, 
though  Jay  in  1794  and  Ellsworth  in  1799  had  served  on  foreign  embassies  while 
in  the  office  of  Chief  Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court.  When  Gallatin  resigned  the 
Treasury  portfolio,  he  was  promptly  confirmed.  The  delay  caused  his  name  to 
be  placed  at  the  bottom  of  the  list  of  envoys,  but  his  experience  and  tact  made 
him  the  acknowledged  leader  in  all  the  negotiations. 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  277 

the  St.  Lawrence.  The  Lakes  too  were  to  be  British,  no  Amer- 
ican posts  to  be  allowed  on  their  shores  or  American  ships  on 
their  waters.  From  the  Sandusky  to  the  Mississippi  the  Western 
territory,  reclaimed  by  the  victories  of  Perry  and  Harrison,  was 
to  be  formed  into  an  Indian  state.  We  were  to  be  excluded 
from  the  Newfoundland  fisheries,  on  the  ground  that  the  war 
had  abrogated  the  treaty  of  1783.  No  concessions  were  to  be 
made  on  the  matters  which  occupied  the  main  place  in  the 
American  instructions — impressments,  the  blockade,  and  in- 
demnity for  maritime  depredations.  The  American  commis- 
sioners, despairing  of  reaching  any  terms  which  we  could 
accept,  were  prepared  to  leave  Ghent,  when  the  scene  changed 
suddenly.  Late  in  October  the  news  of  our  victories  reached 
Europe:  how  Drummond  had  been  repulsed  on  the  banks  of 
the  Niagara ;  how  MacDonough  had  destroyed  the  British  fleet 
on  Lake  Champlain;  how  Prevost  had  retreated  from  Platts- 
burg;  how  Ross's  army  had  failed  before  Baltimore  and  left 
Chesapeake  Bay.  At  the  same  time,  the  negotiations  of  the 
great  European  congress  at  Vienna,  which  Castlereagh  was 
attending  in  person,  took  an  alarming  turn  and  threatened  the 
renewal  of  a  general  European  war.  Point  by  point  the  gov- 
ernment at  London  receded  from  its  high  demands,  while  the 
American  cabinet  dropped  the  impressment  question  as  a  sine 
qua  non  of  peace.1  It  still  took  weeks  of  patient  negotiation,  in 
which  Gallatin  found  the  difficulty  of  reconciling  the  conflicting 
interests  of  Adams  and  Clay  in  the  Newfoundland  fisheries 
and  in  the  navigation  of  the  Mississippi  even  greater  than 
the  difficulty  of  agreeing  with  the  British  envoys,  before  the 
treaty  was  actually  signed  on  .Christmas  Eve.  Its  ten  articles 

ilt  is  still  commonly  taught  in  our  schools  that  impressment  was  the  chief 
cause  of  the  War  of  1812.  But  in  reality  it  was  the  failure  of  the  British  govern- 
ment to  revoke  the  Orders  in  Council  that  we  made  the  casus  belli.  Af  tier  the  war 
was  begun  Madison  continued  it  on  the  issue  of  impressment — for  the  Orders 
were  repealed  at  the  very  outbreak  of  the  war.  The  cabinet  did  not  drop  the  ques- 
tion of  impressments  (as  a  condition  of  peace  or  even  of  an  armistice)  until  the  end 
of  June,  1814.  England  maintained  the  right  of  impressment  as  long  as  she  held  to 
the  doctrine  of  "indefeasible  allegiance."  An  act  of  Parliament  reasserted  the  right 
in  1835,  and  Daniel  Webster  was  still  discussing  it  with  Lord  Ashburton  in  1842. 


278  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

provided  for  nothing  more  than  the  cessation  of  hostilities  and 
the  return  to  the  status  before  the  war,  leaving  the  questions 
of  boundaries;  fisheries,  and  the  navigation  of  the  Mississippi 
open  for  future  adjustment.  Impressment  was  passed  over  in 
silence.  The  treaty  reached  Washington  on  February  14  and 
three  days  later  was  ratified  by  the  unanimous  vote  of  the 
Senate.  It  was  received  with  demonstrations  of  joy  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic,  for,  except  with  a  few  extremists,  the  war 
had  not  been  popular  in  either  country.  The  real  cause  of  the 
war  was  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  for  he  was  the  real  enemy  in  both 
hemispheres.  With  his  fall  fell  the  policies  which  had  been 
reared  to  resist  his  unholy  ambition.  Orders  and  Decrees, 
embargoes  and  nonintercourse,  blockades  and  impressments, 
ceased.  There  was  no  reason  for  either  England  or  America 
to  continue  the  war.  For  England  it  would  have  meant  the 
addition  of  tens  of  millions  of  pounds  to  her  enormous  war  debt, 
the  continued  exposure  of  her  shipping  to  the  American  pri- 
vateers which  already  virtually  blockaded  her  home  waters,1 
and  the  dispatch  of  expedition  after  expedition  to  a  theater  of 
war  three  thousand  miles  distant,  for  the  questionable  satis- 
faction of  "punishing"  a  despised  enemy  or  "rectifying"  the 
Canadian  border.  For  America  it  would  have  meant  the  risk 
of  bankruptcy,  or  even  the  dissolution  of  the  national  govern- 
ment, for  the  sake  of  forcing  Great  Britain  to  deny  in  principle 
an  abuse  which  had  ceased  in  practice. 

iQver  500  American  privateers  were  sent  out  to  prey  on  British  commerce 
during  the  war.  These  swift,  daring  vessels  infested  the  shores  of  the  British 
Isles,  sending  insurance  rates  up  to  ruinous  figures.  A  memorial  of  the  Glasgow 
merchants  and  shippers  to  the  prince  regent  in  September,  1814,  shows  how 
serious  the  danger  was :  "In  the  short  space  of  two  years  above  800  [ships]  have 
been  taken  by  that  power  whose  maritime  strength  we  have  hitherto  held  in 
contempt.  It  is  distressing,  it  is  mortifying,  that  at  a  time  when  we  are  at  peace 
with  all  the  rest  of  the  world,  when  we  have  declared  the  whole  American  coast 
under  blockade,  when  we  pay  so  heavy  a  tax  for  protection  in  the  form  of  con- 
voy duty,  and  our  navy  costs  so  great  a  sum,  we  cannot  traverse  our  own  Chan- 
nel in  safety  nor  effect  insurance  without  excessive  premiums,  and  that  a  horde 
of  American  cruisers,  unheeded,  unresisted,  unmolested,  seize,  burn,  sink,  destroy 
our  ships  in  our  own  inlets  and  in  sight  of  our  own  harbours." 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  279 

That  national  bankruptcy  and  dissolution  were  imminent 
was  the  conviction  of  many,  and  even  the  gratification  of  some. 
Senator  Pickering  of  Massachusetts  wrote  in  January,  1815, 
before  the  news  of  Jackson's  victory  had  reached  the  East: 
"If  the  British  succeed  in  their  expedition  against  New  Orleans 
(and  if  they  have  tolerable  leaders  I  see  no  reason  to  doubt 
of  their  success),  I  shall  consider  the  Union  severed.  I  do  not 
expect  to  see  a  single  representative  in  the  next  Congress  from 
the  Western  states."  Disaffection  had  been  constant  in  New 
England  since  the  beginning  of  "Mr.  Madison's  war."  "Ex- 
press your  sentiments  without  fear,"  said  an  address  of  the 
Massachusetts  General  Court  to  the  people  of  the  state,  "and 
let  the  sound  of  your  disapproval  of  this  war  be  loud  and 
deep.  ...  If  your  sons  must  be  torn  from  you  by  conscription, 
consign  them  to  the  care  of  God,  but  let  there  be  no  volunteering 
except  for  defensive  war."  The  New  England  governors  re- 
fused to  furnish  militia  for  the  invasion  of  Canada,  their  bankers 
declined  to  subscribe  to  national  loans  "to  heat  the  war  poker," 
their  merchants  speculated  in  British  bills  of  exchange,  and 
their  farmers  supplied  the  armies  in  Canada  with  beef  and 
grain.  When  the  government  returned  to  Washington  in  the 
autumn  of  1814,  the  ruins  amid  which  it  sat  down  were  a 
symbol  of  its  own  condition.  The  Treasury  borrowed  paltry 
sums  of  the  local  bankers- of  Georgetown  to  meet  pressing  bills. 
Not  only  the  New  England  States  but  New  York,  Pennsylvania, 
Virginia,  Maryland,  and  Kentucky  began  to  raise  armies  for 
their  own  defense.  "The  states  must  and  will  take  care  of 
themselves,"  said  Congressman  Miller  of  New  York. 

A  call  went  out  from  the  legislature  of  Massachusetts  to  the 
other  New  England  States,  in  October,  1814,  for  a  convention 
of  delegates  "to  unite  in  such  measures  for  our  safety  as  the 
times  demand  and  the  principles  of  justice  and  the  law  of  self- 
preservation  will  justify."  Connecticut  and  Rhode  Island 
responded  promptly,  and  twenty-three  delegates  (later  joined 
by  three  members  from  Vermont  and  New  Hampshire)  met 
at  Hartford,  December  15,  1814.  For  three  weeks  they  sat 


280  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

behind  closed  doors,  secrecy  giving  the  air  of  conspiracy  to  their 
deliberations.  There  were  wild  rumors  abroad  of  the  seces- 
sion of  New  England  and  her  alliance  with  Great  Britain.  But 
when  the  debates  were  published  some  years  later,  they  proved 
to  be  no  more  treasonable  than  the  Virginia  and  Kentucky 
Resolutions  of  1798.  The  convention  declared  that  when  there 
were  "deliberate,  dangerous,  and  palpable  infractions  of  the 
Constitution"  it  was  the  right  and  duty  of  the  states  to  "inter- 
pose their  authority  for  the  preservation  of  their  liberties."  It 
resolved  that  the  states  represented  should  take  steps  to  pro- 
tect their  citizens  from  conscription  by  act  of  Congress  and  to 
secure  the  right  to  divert,  for  the  support  of  armies  raised  in 
the  state  for  the  defense  of  its  own  territory,  a  part  of  the 
federal  revenue  collected  in  the  states.  It  also  recommended 
amendments  to  the  Constitution  omitting  slaves  from  the  census 
on  which  representation  and  direct  taxes  are  based ;  requiring 
a  two-thirds  vote  of  Congress  to  admit  new  states,  impose  com- 
mercial restrictions,  or  declare  war ;  excluding  naturalized  citi- 
zens from  federal  office ;  limiting  the  president  to  a  single  term ; 
and  prohibiting  the  election  of  two  persons  in  succession  from 
the  same  state.  The  hostility  to  the  South  and  the  "Virginia 
dynasty"  of  presidents  in  these  proposed  amendments  to  the 
Constitution  is  obvious.  Three  envoys  were  appointed  to  carry 
the  resolutions  of  the  convention  to  Washington  to  "negotiate" 
with  the  federal  government.  They  learned  on  their  way  of 
Jackson's  victory  at  New  Orleans,  and  arrived  in  Washington 
together  with  the  messenger  who  brought  the  news  of  the  peace 
treaty  of  Ghent.  Amid  the  general  rejoicing  the  "ambassa- 
dors" from  New  England  slipped  out  of  the  capital  as  quietly 
as  they  had  come  in,  and  nothing  more  was  heard  of  the  "states' 
rights"  doctrine  of  New  England  Federalism. 

There  is  little  reason  for  Americans  to  be  proud  of  the  War 
of  1812.  Although  Madison,  in  transmitting  the  treaty  of  peace 
to  the  Senate,  spoke  exuberantly  of  our  success  as  the  "natural 
result  of  the  wisdom  of  legislative  councils,  of  the  patriotism 
of  the  people,  of  the  public  spirit  of  the  militia,  and  the  valor 
of  the  military  and  naval  forces  of  the  country,"  every  historical 


THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES  281 

scholar  knows  that  the  sober  truth  of  the  matter  is  summed 
up  in  Admiral  Mahan's  characterization:  "a  record  upon  the 
whole  of  gloom,  desertion,  and  governmental  incompetence,  re- 
sulting from  the  lack  of  national  preparation."  The  military 
significance  of  the  war  was  trifling,  the  armies  were  small,  and 
the  total  losses  in  killed  and  wounded  were  less  than  5000  in 
a  population  of  8,000,000.  The  enemy  never  penetrated  more 
than  twenty-five  or  thirty  miles  into  our  territory  and,  except 
for  Washington,  never  held  one  of  our  cities  for  a  day.  Never- 
theless, the  effects  of  the  war  upon  our  political,  economic,  and 
social  life  were  far-reaching.  America  struck  out  on  a  new 
path  in  1815 — the  path  of  full  autonomy  and  quickened  na- 
tional consciousness.  Since  the  beginning  of  Washington's 
second  administration  we  had  been  in  a  state  of  semicolonial 
dependence  on  the  Old  World.  Our  parties  had  been  English  and 
French,  "Anglomen"  and  "Jacobins."  The  actions  of  Pitt  and 
Talleyrand,  of  Canning  and  Napoleon,  had  dictated  our  policies. 
Adjustment  to  European  conditions  had  been  our  chief  concern. 
We  had  made  seven  treaties  with  foreign  nations  within  the 
period  1794-1814.  But  in  1815  all  this  changed  suddenly.  We 
turned  our  back  on  Europe  and  began  to  grapple  with  the  prob- 
lems of  our  national  life  and  the  development  of  our  national 
domain.  Embargo,  nonintercourse,  blockade,  and  war  had  al- 
most ruined  our  shipping.  Large  sums  of  money  were  already 
finding  employment  in  manufacturing  industries.  In  1815  New 
England  had  $40,000,000  invested  in  cotton  factories  alone, 
which  handled  27,000,000  pounds  of  raw  cotton.  The  war  had 
revealed  the  need  for  a  stable  currency,  a  dependable  revenue, 
a  national  army,  adequate  defenses  on  the  frontiers  and  the 
coasts,  canals  and  roads  to  bind  the  sections  of  the  country 
into  a  real  Union. 

But,  most  important  of  all,  the  strong  particularistic  senti- 
ment that  had  been  brought  out  by  the  war  aroused  the  country 
to  the  danger  of  the  dissipation  of  political  power  to  which  the 
doctrine  of  states'  rights  might  lead.  The  fate  of  our  national 
government  hung  in  the  balance  at  the  close  of  the  year  1814. 
"The  shock  of  a  severe  defeat  at  New  Orleans,"  says  Professor 


282  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Babcock,  "or  a  complete  rupture  at  Ghent,  might  have  loosed 
even  the  slender  ties  holding  the  administration  together,  and 
sent  the  fragments  of  a  discredited  government  flying  from 
the  capital,  just  as  the  march  of  the  British  had  dispersed  the 
President  and  his  cabinet  in  the  preceding  summer. "  The 
"revolution  of  1800,"  which  had  brought  Jefferson  into  power, 
had  been  based  on  distrust  of  a  strong  central  government.  It  had 
heralded  democracy — but  a  democracy  which  was  suspicious 
of  nationalism.  Political  power  should  be  strongest  in  the  local 
centers  and  delegated  with  decreasing  confidence  to  the  remoter 
"higher"  authorities.  But  the  actual  management  of  govern- 
ment had  taught  the  Republican  statesmen,  beginning  with  Jef- 
ferson himself,  the  impracticability  of  their  theory,  and  the 
stress  of  war  had  completed  the  lesson.  By  1815  the  Repub- 
licans had  abandoned  every  point  of  opposition  to  a  supreme 
national  power.  The  presidents  had  issued  proclamations,  and 
their  Congresses  had  revived  whole  systems  of  Federalist  tax- 
ation. The  words  spoken  by  Jefferson  in  the  generous  rhetoric 
of  his  first  inaugural  were  now  true  in  fact :  there  were  no  longer 
Republicans  and  Federalists,  for  the  Republicans  had  put  on 
Federalism.  Democracy  and  nationalism  were  joined  in  a 
happy  union,  destined  to  inspire  the  coming  generation  to 
wonderful  accomplishments  in  the  name  of  the  new  America. 
The  one-time  author  of  the  Virginia  Resolutions  wrote  the  pro- 
gram of  the  new  age  in  his  annual  message  to  Congress  in 
December,  1815 — a  liberal  provision  for  national  defense,  new 
frigates  for  the  navy,  a  standing  army,  national  aid  for  the 
construction  of  roads  and  canals,  encouragement  to  manufac- 
tures by  a  protective  tariff,  and  even  the  reestablishment  of  a 
National  Bank.  All  of  this  was  "for  the  great  object  of  ena- 
bling the  political  authority  of  the  Union  to  employ  promptly 
and  effectually  the  physical  power  of  the  Union  in  the  cases 
designated  by  the  Constitution."  The  Jeffersonian  era  was 
closed. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  NEW  NATIONALISM 

Europe  extends  to  the  Alleghenies,  America  lies  beyond. 

RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON 

EXPANSION — POLITICAL,  INDUSTRIAL,  AND  TERRITORIAL 

The  keynote  of  the  period  of  American  history  from  the 
close  of  the  second  war  with  England  to  the  presidency  of 
Andrew  Jackson  is  expansion — the  amplification  of  the  power 
of  the  central  government  in  acts  of  Congress  and  decisions  of 
the  Supreme  Court,  the  development  of  .industry  in  manufac- 
tures and  agriculture,  and  the  extension  of  our  frontier  beyond 
the  Mississippi.  This  triple  process  of  political,  economic,  and 
geographical  adjustment  brought  new  forces  into  play  in  our 
American  life  and  raised  the  problems  of  states'  rights,  pro- 
tectionism, the  status  of  territories,  internal  improvements, 
sectional  rivalries,  and  slavery,  which  characterize  the  years 
1815-1860 — the  "middle  period"  of  our  history. 

The  response  of  the  Republican  Congress  to  Madison's  mes- 
sage of  December  5,  1815,  was  prompt  and  hearty,  and  no  less 
hearty  was  the  response  of  the  country  to  the  measures  of  Con- 
gress. If  traces  of  that  suspicion  of  the  abuse  of  power  in  the 
hands  of  the  central  government  which  had  been  the  creed  of  the 
Jeffersonian  party  of  1800  still  remained,  they  were  confined  to 
the  few  "old  Republicans,"  like  John  Randolph  of  Roanoke, — 
belated  voices  crying  in  the  wilderness.  The  Republican  party 
had  put  off  its  particularism  and  become  strongly  national- 
istic. As  Josiah  Quincy  remarked,  with  a  tinge  of  sarcasm  in 
his  congratulation,  it  had  "out-Federalized  Federalism."  No 
sooner  was  the  President's  message  read  than  a  committee  of 
Congress,  headed  by  John  C.  Calhoun,  was  appointed  to  deal 

283 


284  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

with  the  pressing  question  of  our  currency.  It  reported  a  bill 
for  the  establishment  of  a  National  Bank  with  a  capital  of 
$35,000,000,  whose  stock  should  be  subscribed  to  partly  in  coin 
and  partly  in  the  funded  debt  of  the  United  States  and  whose 
notes  should  be  receivable  for  all  dues  to  the  government.  The 
Bank  was  to  be  exempt  from  taxation  and  was  to  hold  the 
government  balances  free  of  interest.  In  return  for  these  favors 
it  was  to  transfer  public  funds  from  point  to  point  without 
brokerage  charges,  lend  the  government  sums  up  to  $500,000, 
and  pay  a  bonus  of  $1,500,000  for  its  charter,  which  was  to 
run  twenty  years.  The  United  States  should  own  one  fifth  of 
the  Bank's  stock  and  appoint  one  fifth  of  the  board  of  directors. 
Southern  statesmen  had  opposed  the  establishment  of  Hamil- 
ton's Bank  a  quarter  of  a  century  earlier,  on  the  ground  that 
it  was  an  undue  extension  of  the  powers  " necessary  and  proper" 
to  carry  out  the  functions  given  to  Congress  by  the  Constitu- 
tion, but  Calhoun  now  declared  that  any  discussion  of  the 
constitutional  aspect  of  the  case  was  "a  useless  consumption  of 
time."  Henry  Clay  had  argued  against  the  recharter  of  the 
old  Bank  in  1811,  but  now  he  descended  from  the  Speaker's 
chair  to  urge  the  charter  of  the  new  Bank,  confessing  that  he 
was  "  willing  to  sacrifice  the  pride  of  consistency  rather  than  the 
welfare  of  the  country."  The  Republican  press  literally  took  a 
leaf  from  Hamilton's  book  of  politics  by  reprinting  his  argu- 
ments for  the  charter  of  the  Bank  advanced  in  1 791.  The  Bank 
bill  passed  the  House  by  a  vote  of  80  to  69,  the  Senate  con- 
curred, and  President  Madison,  "  surmounting  the  prejudices 
of  a  lifetime,"  signed  the  bill  on  April  10,  1816.  Early  the  next 
year  the  Bank  went  into  operation,  -rapidly  extending  its  busi- 
ness to  nineteen  branch  establishments  in  the  various  states. 
Although  the  Bank  was  neither  very  wisely  nor  very  honestly 
managed  in  the  first  two  years,  its  beneficent  influence  on  the 
currency  of  the  country  was  felt  immediately.  The  state  banks, 
which  had  increased  from  fewer  than  100  in  1811  to  nearly 
300  in  1 8 1 6  and  which  had  flooded  the  country  with  notes  whose 
value  diminished  from  New  England  southward  and  westward, 
were  obliged  to  resume  specie  payment  by  February  20,  1817, 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  285 

on  pain  of  having  whatever  government  deposits  they  held 
withdrawn.  In  the  three  years  following  the  establishment  of 
the  Bank  the  amount  of  state  bank  notes  decreased  over  40 
per  cent,  being  replaced  by  the  uniform,  specie-based  notes  of 
the  Bank  of  the  United  States.1  Secretary  Alexander  J.  Dallas, 
to  whose  genius  and  energy  this  reorganization  of  our  fiscal 
system  was  chiefly  due,  retired  from  the  Treasury  in  1816, 
handing  over  to  his  successor,  William  H.  Crawford,  a  surplus 

Of  $2O,OOO,OOO.2 

Seventeen  days  after  the  Bank  bill  became  law  Madison 
signed  another  bill,  which  gave  even  stronger  proof  of  the  new 
nationalistic  spirit.  Embargo,  nonintercourse,  and  war  had  vir- 
tually ruined  American  shipping.  Our  foreign  trade  dropped 
from  $246,800,000  in  1807  to  $19,800,000  in  1814.  Capital  to 
the  amount  of  some  $100,000,000  was  diverted  into  manufac- 
tures. A  memorial  presented  to  Congress  by  the  New  England 
manufacturers  in  December,  1815,  recounted  the  progress  of 
the  cotton  and  woolen  industries  in  that  section.  There  were 
already  140  cotton  mills  within  a  radius  of  thirty  miles  of 
Providence,  Rhode  Island.  Pioneer  industries  had  been  car- 
ried across  the  Alleghenies  to  the  Ohio  valley,  where  cotton 
and  woolen  mills  and  factories  for  the  manufacture  of  their 
machinery  were  found  scattered  from  Pittsburgh  to  Cincinnati. 
When  the  war  ended,  England  began  "dumping"  the  accumu- 
lated products  of  her  factories  on  the  American  market  at 
ominously  cheap  prices,  "in  order,"  as  Lord  Brougham  said 

1The  state  banks  had  issued  some  $170,000,000  of  paper  currency,  based  on 
not  more  than  $15,000,000  of  specie  in  their  vaults.  When  all  the  banks  south 
and  west  of  New  England  suspended  specie  payment  (that  is,  redemption  of  their 
notes  in  coin),  in  the  autumn  of  1814,  these  notes  became  practically  "bills  of 
credit,"  whose  issue  is  expressly  forbidden  to  the  states  by  the  Constitution. 
Like  bills  of  credit,  they  depreciated,  passing  at  different  values  in  different  parts 
of  the  country.  Only  in  New  England,  where  the  banks  still  paid  specie,  were 
the  notes  at  par.  The  contamination  of  this  depreciated  currency  added  to  the 
weakness  of  the  country  in  1814-1815,  causing  the  United  States  Treasury  notes 
also  to  decline  and  fluctuate  in  credit. 

2  It  is  a  singular  fact  that  the  three  greatest  Secretaries  of  the  Treasury  in  our 
history  before  the  Civil  War  were  all  aliens :  Hamilton  and  Dallas  were  born 
in  the  British  West  Indies,  Gallatin  in  Switzerland. 


286  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

in  Parliament,  "to  stifle  in  the  cradle  those  rising  manufactures 
in  the  United  States  which  the  war  has  forced  into  exist- 
ence, contrary  to  the  natural  course  of  things" — the  "natural 
course"  being  England's  continued  monopoly  of  the  Amer- 
ican trade.  In  a  single  year  England  sent  $90,000,000  of  mer- 
chandise to  our  shores.  Crates  of  earthenware  and  bales  of 
cotton  goods,  piled  on  the  docks  of  Philadelphia,  Baltimore,  and 
New  York,  were  sold  to  eager  bidders  at  auction.  Over  $450,000 
was  realized  from  a  single  week's  sale,  and  the  receipts  of 
the  New  York  customhouse  from  April  to  June,  1815,  were 
almost  $4,000,000.  To  what  end  had  we  finally  accomplished 
our  political  independence  of  the  Old  World  if  we  were  now  to 
be  made  an  economic  satellite  of  Great  Britain!  How  could 
we  maintain  our  dignity  as  a  nation  if  we  were  to  remain  de- 
pendent on  foreign  countries  for  the  necessities  and  comforts 
of  life!  Even  the  Virginians  of  the  old  school  joined  the 
enthusiastic  prophets  of  the  younger  generation — like  Clay, 
Lowndes,  Calhoun,  Grundy,  and  Porter — in  their  demand  for 
national  encouragement  to  the  development  of  our  national 
industries.  Jefferson,  who,  in  his  "Notes  on  Virginia,"  had 
urged  that  "our  workshops  should  remain  in  Europe,"  lest  the 
introduction  of  their  industrial  proletarians  should  substitute 
the  corrupting  influences  of  the  cities  for  the  Arcadian  virtues 
of  agriculture  in  our  land,  now  declared  himself  in  favor  of 
domestic  manufactures,  to  save  us  from  the  alternative  of  being 
reduced  to  dependence  on  a  foreign  country  or  "to  be  clothed  in 
skins  and  to  live  like  wild  beasts  in  dens  and  caverns."  Madison 
recommended  protection  to  home  industries  in  his  last  two  mes- 
sages to  Congress,  and  Monroe  echoed  the  same  sentiments  in 
his  inaugural  address. 

It  was  in  response  to  this  demand  for  economic  self- 
sufficiency,  rather  than  as  a  deliberate  favor  to  the  newly 
established  industries,  that  Congress,  in  the  spring  of  1816, 
passed  a  tariff  bill  continuing,  and  even  slightly  enhancing,  the 
"double  duties"  levied  for  the  support  of  the  war.  Iron,  glass, 
hardware,  pottery,  leather,  and  woolens  profited  by  the  new 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  287 

tariff,  but  cotton  was  the  chief  beneficiary.  No  other  industry 
had  made  such  rapid  progress.  Thanks  to  the  improvement  of 
the  cotton  gin,  the  spinning  jenny,  and  the  power  loom,  our  mills 
consumed  90,000  bales  of  cotton  in  the  year  1815,  as  against 
100  bales  a  decade  earlier,  and  turned  out  a  product  worth 
$9,000,000.  To  prevent  the  competition  of  the  cheap  fabrics 
from  India,  worth  as  low  as  6  cents  a  yard,  the  bill  of  1816 
provided  that  no  imported  cotton  would  be  rated  at  less  than 
2  5  cents  a  yard  in  the  tariff  schedule.  The  bill  was  reported  by 
a  committee  whose  chairman  (Lowndes)  and  a  majority  of 
whose  members  were  Southerners,  and  it  was  supported  in 
every  state  of  the  Union  except  North  Carolina  and  Louisiana. 
There  were  no  constitutional  objections  raised.  The  bill 
was  a  measure  of  national  preparedness.  Only  a  few  men, 
like  John  Randolph  and  McDuffie,  called  attention  in  vain  to 
the  truth  (which  was  later  realized  by  all  the  statesmen  of  the 
South)  that  it  favored  the  manufacturer  at  the  expense  of  the 
farmer.  "I  lay  the  claims  of  the  manufacturer  entirely  out  of 
view,"  replied  Calhoun;  "it  is  the  duty  of  the  country  as  a 
means  of  defense  to  encourage  the  domestic  industry  of  the 
country."  The  bill,  he  thought,  would  bind  the  different  sec- 
tions of  our  rapidly  growing  country  together,  and  this  mutual 
dependence  would  be  the  surest  guaranty  against  that  direst  of 
all  dangers  that  could  threaten  us — disunion. 

Other  measures  testifying  to  the  new  spirit  of  nationalism 
were  passed  immediately  on  the  close  of  the  war.  To  avoid  a 
repetition  of  the  humiliating  experience  of  relying  on  an  un- 
reliable militia,  Congress  voted  to  maintain  a  regular  army  of 
10,000  men,  with  Jacob  Brown  and  Andrew  Jackson  as  major 
generals  for  the  Northern  and  Southern  sections  respectively. 
While  such  important  points  as  boundaries,  fishing-rights,  the 
West  Indian  trade,  and  impressments  were  left  unsettled  by  the 
peace,  there  was  no  guaranty  that  the  peace  would  be  per- 
manent or  of  long  duration.  We  were  pledged,  as  Secretary 
Monroe  said  in  1815,  "to  maintain  our  rank  among  the  nations." 
Jefferson's  gunboats  were  ordered  to  be  sold,  and  appropriations 


288  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

were  made  for  new  warships  to  guard  our  coasts  and  our  ship- 
ping effectively.  Two  hundred  thousand  dollars  a  year  for  three 
years  was  voted  for  the  purchase  of  ship  timber  alone.  Al- 
together the  appropriations  for  army  and  navy  reached  some 
$4,500,000.  Our  coast  defenses  were  strengthened,  our  interior 
forts  remanned  and  reprovisioned,  taxes  levied  on  foreign  ton- 
nage in  our  ports,  and  our  coastwise  trade  confined  to  ships  of 
American  registry. 

The  acceptability  of  the  new  Republican  program  of  nation- 
alism to  the  country  at  large  was  shown  by  the  presidential 
election  of  1816.  Backed  by  the  influence  of  President  Madison, 
James  Monroe,  Secretary  of  State,  secured  the  Republican 
nomination  over  his  colleague  in  the  cabinet,  William  H.  Craw- 
ford of  Georgia,  in  a  very  "thin"  caucus  of  Congress,  by  the 
narrow  vote  of  65  to  54.  Monroe  was  not  a  man  of  first-rate 
ability,  like  Jefferson,  but  his  patriotism,  openness,  industry, 
and  intellectual  patience  were  unquestioned.  He  was  plodding 
and  visionless,  too  opinionated  and  insistent  over  small  matters. 
His  diplomatic  record  at  the  three  courts  of  Paris,  Madrid,  and 
London  left  much  to  be  desired.  His  Federalist  rival,  Rufus 
King  of  New  York,  was  an  abler  statesman,  but  his  weakness 
was  the  weakness  of  declining  Federalism,  while  Monroe's 
strength  was  the  strength  of  the  new  national  Republicanism. 
The  Federalists  were  under  no  illusions  as  to  the  desperate  con- 
dition of  their  party — the  party  of  the  Hartford  Convention, 
of  opposition  to  the  war,  of  antagonism  to  the  admission  of 
Louisiana,  and  of  hostility  to  the  growing  West.  "If  we  can- 
not make  any  impression  upon  the  presidential  election  at  this 
time,"  wrote  Timothy  Pickering  to  King,  "I  see  no  hope  for  the 
future."  King  himself  had  abandoned  hope  after  his  unsuccess- 
ful canvass  for  the  governorship  of  New  York  in  the  spring  of 
1816.  He  spoke  of  his  candidacy  as  "a  fruitless  struggle."  He 
even  confessed  that  it  was  "the  real  interest  and  policy  of  the 
country  that  the  Democracy  should  pursue  its  natural  course." 
"Federalists  of  our  age,"  he  said,  "must  be  content  with  the 
past."  All  that  remained  to  them,  he  said  to  his  son  Edward, 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  289 

was  "to  support  the  least  wicked  section  of  Republicans  in 
case  of  division  among  them.'7  The  election  of  November  con- 
firmed King's  gloomy  prophecy.  He  received  only  34  electo- 
ral votes  from  the  states  of  Massachusetts.  Connecticut,  and 
Delaware.  The  other  nineteen  states  cast  their  183  votes  for 
Monroe. 

A  few  weeks  after  his  inauguration  President  Monroe  set 
out  for  a  tour  of  the  North  and  West  for  the  ostensible  purpose 
of  inspecting  the  national  defenses.  As  he  journeyed  north- 
ward through  Baltimore,  Philadelphia,  Trenton,  and  New  York 
he  was  received  with  enthusiastic  demonstrations  of  welcome, 
which  rose  to  such  a  pitch  when  he  reached  New  England  that 
"a  humorous  cynic  compared  the  scene  to  the  adoration  of  the 
Wise  Men  of  the  East."  Hartford,  only  eighteen  months  earlier 
the  seat  of  the  convention  which  had  been  bent  on  wresting  the 
control  of  the  government  from  the  hands  of  the  "Virginia 
dynasty,"  now  hailed  this  Virginian  president  as  the  "political 
father  and  guide"  and  assured  him  that  party  spirit  no  longer 
rendered  "alien  to  each  other  those  who  ought  to  be  bound 
together  by  fraternal  affection."  In  Boston,  the  very  citadel 
of  Federalism,  the  public  authorities  and  the  press  vied  with 
each  other  in  heaping  honors  upon  this  intimate  friend  of 
Jefferson's,  who  had  contributed  so  much  to  the  conduct  of 
"Mr.  Madison's  war."  The  Boston  Centinel,  which  had  ap- 
peared edged  in  mourning  when  Jefferson  was  elected  to  the 
presidency,  spoke  of  Monroe's  visit  as  a  jubilee  which  ushered 
in  "an  era  of  good  feelings."  Monroe  took  up  the  phrase  and 
repeated  it  as  he  journeyed  northward  to  Portsmouth,  then 
across  the  states  of  New  Hampshire,  Vermont,  and  New  York  to 
Ogdensburg,  and  thence  by  the  St.  Lawrence  and  the  Lakes  to 
Buffalo  and  Detroit.  The  phrase  caught  the  fancy  of  the 
American  people  too  and  has  served  ever  since  to  designate 
the  period  of  Monroe's  presidency. 

In  spite  of  the  festive  optimism  with  which  it  had  been  ush- 
ered in,  however,  Monroe's  term  of  office  was  anything  but  an 
era  of  good  feelings.  With  the  burden  of  foreign  war  removed, 


2  go  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

with  our  manufactures  encouraged  and  our  trade  improved,1 
with  our  Treasury  filled2  and  the  Indian  danger  removed  so  that 
the  pioneers  could  safely  move  to  the  Mississippi  and  beyond, 
up  the  valley  of  the  Missouri,  there  emerged  a  number  of  prob- 
lems and  sectional  interests  which  had  been  seen  only  dimly 
before  the  war.  Since  by  far  the  most  important  of  these  prob- 
lems were  raised  by  the  development  of  the  country  west  of  the 
Alleghenies,  we  must  now  turn  our  attention  to  that  region. 

No  other  single  factor  in  American  life  has  had  so  continuous 
and  decisive  an  influence  as  our  ever-westward-moving  frontier. 
Already  in  the  colonial  days  there  had  developed  a  marked 
contrast  between  the  merchants  and  planters  on  the  Atlantic 
coast  and  the  pioneer  farmers  of  the  "back  country,"  whom  the 
call  of  cheaper  land,  the  love  of  adventure,  the  desire  to  escape 
debts  and  taxes,  and  the  determination  to  be  rid  of  the 
aristocratic  pretensions  of  the  ruling  propertied  classes  drove 
westward  under  the  urge  of  that  same  "rude  impulse"  which 
had  sent  their  fathers  across  the  sea.  In  the  same  year  that  the 
French  relinquished  their  claims  to  the  west  of  the  Alleghe- 
nies,  stretching  "all  down  at  the  back  of  our  colonies,"  King 
George  III  drew  the  Proclamation  Line  along  the  crest  of  the 
mountains  and  forbade  the  colonists  to  cross  it  into  the  Indian 
lands  (1763).  But  King  George's  decree  was  no  more  effective 
than  King  Canute's.  Pioneers  from  Virginia  and  the  Carolinas 
followed  Boone,  Robertson,  and  Harrod  across  the  Alleghe- 
nies  and  down  the  westward-flowing  rivers  into  Kentucky  and 
Tennessee.  Others  left  the  rocky  farms  of  New  England  for 
the  rich  river  bottoms  of  the  Ohio.  Before  the  inauguration 
of  Washington  over  100,000  settlers  had  entered  the  Western 
country,  and  a  number  of  new  states  had  been  projected  (Van- 
dalia,  Transylvania,  Westsylvania,  Franklin)  within  the  limits 
of  western  Pennsylvania  and  Virginia  and  the  present  states 
of  Kentucky  and  Tennessee. 

1Our  exports  for  1815  were  $52,500,000,  and  our  imports  $103,000,000.  The 
figures  for  1816  were  $81,000,000  and  $147,000,000  respectively. 

2  Dallas  estimated  the  customs  receipts  for  1816  at  $13,000,000.  They  actually 
were  $39,000,000. 


PROJECTS  FOR  NEW  WESTERN  STATES  IN  THE 
REVOLUTIONARY  EPOCH 


2  92  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  conditions  of  life  beyond  the  mountains  tended  to 
enhance  the  spirit  of  self-reliance  and  adventurous  enterprise 
which  had  caused  these  pioneers  to  separate  from  their  brothers 
on  the  seaboard.  Not  only  did  they  have  to  employ  constant 
vigilance  in  defending  their  families  against  the  Indians  and  in 
getting  a  living  from  the  inhospitable  forest,  but  they  showed 
this  same  vigilance  in  their  political  life.  They  were  a  new 
band  of  immigrants,  carrying  a  new  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence into  the  Western  land.1  They  formed  "bodies  politic," 
" association's,"  " societies"  for  "their  own  and  the  public  good," 
petitioning  the  old  states  within  whose  limits  they  were  to 
recognize  them  and  take  them  under  their  protection.  They 
realized  that  they  were  the  heralds  of  an  American  empire, 
"erecting,"  as  one  of  their  leaders  said,  "the  corner-stone  of 
an  edifice,  the  height  and  magnificence  of  whose  superstructure 
is  now  in  the  womb  of  futurity."  But  they  were  looked  upon 
by  the  older  communities,  which  they  had  left,  as  groups  of  mal- 
contents, "lawless  mobs,"  "hordes  of  bandits,"  "land  pirates." 
Their  departure  was  sometimes  deplored  as  a  secession,  weak- 
ening the  political  authority  and  disturbing  the  economic  sta- 
bility of  the  states,  and  sometimes  welcomed  as  a  relief  to 
the  "sober  and  well-disposed"  people  whom  they  left  behind. 
President  Dwight  of  Yale  College,  in  the  "land  of  steady 
habits,"  thanked  Providence  for  "opening  in  the  vast  western 
wilderness  a  retreat  sufficiently  alluring  to  draw  them  away 
from  the  land  of  their  nativity." 

The  tide  of  westward  migration  fluctuated  with  the  political 
fortunes  of  the  government.  During  the  period  of  general  war 
in  Europe,  and  the  consequent  expansion  of.  the  American 
carrying-trade  from  1793  to  1807,  there  was  sufficient  demand 
for  men  and  goods  in  our  seaports  to  interrupt  the  migration 
to  the  West.  But  embargo,  nonintercourse,  and  the  virtual 
ruin  of  our  trade  in  the  second  war  with  Great  Britain  again 

1It  is  interesting  to  compare  the  language  of  the  convention  which  met  to 
establish  the  new  state  of  Franklin  in  1785  with  that  of  the  Declaration  of 
Independence. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  293 

turned  men's  eyes  and  feet  across  the  mountains,  where  fine 
land  was  to  be  bought  in  quarter  sections  (160  acres)  at  two 
dollars  an  acre.  The  victories  of  Harrison  north  of  the  Ohio 
and  of  Jackson  south  of  the  Tennessee  relieved  the  pressure 
from  hostile  Indians  on  our  frontiers.  The  appearance  of  the 
steamboat  on  the  Ohio  and  the  Mississippi  guaranteed  the 
rapid  development  of  the  commerce  of  our  great  "hinterland" 
through  the  port  of  New  Orleans.  After  the  Treaty  of  Ghent 
a  veritable  exodus  to  the  Western  country  began.  The  news- 
papers of  the  times,  diaries  and  letters  of  travelers,  prospec- 
tuses of  land-booming  companies,  reports  of  committees  of 
state  legislatures — all  testify  to  the  steady  stream  of  emigrants 
along  the  Western  pikes  and  trails.  They  went  on  horseback 
or  in  big  covered  wagons,  or  sometimes  even  walked,  pushing 
before  them  rude  carts  piled  high  with  their  household  goods 
and  driving  their  cattle.  In  the  year  1817  a  company  of  120 
from  Durham,  Maine,  started  out  to  purchase  a  township  in 
Indiana,  following  their  pastor  as  the  Massachusetts  Puritans 
had  followed  Hooker  to  the  Connecticut  valley  nearly  two  cen- 
turies before.  The  same  year  nearly  4000  emigrants  from  the 
Carolinas  and  Georgia  met  at  Burnt  Corn  Springs,  bound  for 
the  cotton  lands  on  the  Alabama  River,  with  "  carts,  sleighs, 
rigs,  coaches,  and  waggons/'  and  fifty  droves  of  cattle  and  hogs. 
The  ranks  of  the  emigrants  were  swollen  by  new  immigrants 
from  Europe,  especially  from  Germany  and  the  British  Isles, 
where  a  period  of  acute  industrial  depression  had  followed  the 
exertions  of  the  long  series  of  wars  against  Napoleon.  An 
English  traveler,  himself  among  the  stream  of  settlers  of  1817 
seeking  a  new  home  in  the  West,  wrote  in  his  "  Notes  on  a 
Journey  from  Virginia  to  Illinois":  "The  old  America  seems 
to  be  breaking  up  and  moving  westward.  We  are  seldom  out 
of  sight,  as  we  travel  on  this  grand  track  towards  the  Ohio,  of 
family  groups  behind  and  before  us." 

From  New  England  to  Georgia  there  were  protests  against 
this  depletion  of  man  power.  The  populous  Atlantic  states 
remained  stationary  while  the  Western  communities  grew  some 


294 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


50,  some  100,  and  some  500  per  cent  in  the  few  years  imme- 
diately following  the  war.1  "That  alarming  disease  denomi- 
nated the  Ohio  fever,"  said  the  New  Hampshire  Supporter  in 
1817,  "continues  to  rage  in  many  parts  of  New  England,  by 
which  vast  numbers  are  taken  off.  In  Connecticut  it  has  spread 
to  such  a  surprising  extent  that  Governor  Walcott  considers 
an  investigation  of  the  causes  which  produce  it  as  by  far  the 
most  important  subject  which  can  engage  the  attention  of  the 
legislature."  Two  years  earlier  a  committee  of  the  North  Caro- 
lina legislature  had  complained  that  only  600,000  people  were 
left  in  the  state,  while  it  was  "mortifying  to  see  that  thousands 
of  rich  and  respectable  citizens  were  moving  west  each  year" 
to  add  to  the  200,000  who  had  already  "removed  to  the  waters 
of  the  Ohio  and  the  Tennessee  since  the  inauguration  of  General 
Washington."  The  Virginia  legislature  complained  of  "wasted 
and  deserted  fields,  of  dwellings  abandoned  ...  of  churches 
in  ruins,  because  the  fathers  of  the  land  are  gone  where  another 
outlet  to  the  ocean  [the  Mississippi]  turns  their  thoughts  from 
the  place  of  their  nativity  and  their  affections  from  the  haunts 
of  their  youth." 

It  was  inevitable  that  this  rapid  movement  of  population  to 
the  West  should  bring  with  it  important  consequences  for  our 
economic,  political,  and  social  life.  The  first  effect  was  the 
awakening  of  our  people  to  the  need  for  adequate  means  of 
transportation  for  the  development  of  the  home  market  which 
grew  up  with  the  expanding  surplus  of  agricultural  products. 
The  farmers  of  the  Northwest  sent  their  pork  and  beef,  their 
butter,  beans,  corn,  flour,  cheese,  apples,  whisky,  cider,  and 
vinegar  down  the  Ohio  and  the  Mississippi  to  New  Orleans. 
In  1818  there  passed  through  that  port  136,000  tons  of  prod- 
uce, valued  at  $16,771,711.  Cattle  and  hogs  to  the  number  of 

aThe  following  figures  from  the  census  reports  are  eloquent: 


MASSACHUSETTS 

NEW  YORK 

VIRGINIA 

INDIANA 

MISSOURI 

MISSISSIPPI 

1810 
•  1820 

472,040 
523,287 

959,049 
I,373,8i2 

974,600 
1,065,386 

24,520 
147,178 

19,783 
66,586 

40,352 

75,448 

THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  295 

100,000  were  driven  each  year  from  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  Ken- 
tucky to  the  seaboard,  feeding  on  the  way,  to  furnish  meat  for 
export  and  hides  for  the  New  England  leather  manufacturers. 
As  the  cotton-planters  moved  into  the  fresh  lands  of  the  South- 
west and  built  their  plantation  wharves  along  the  banks  of  the 
Mississippi,  they  began  to  absorb  the  supplies  of  horses,  mules, 
hay,  and  food  that  came  down  the  river.  More  than  half 
a  million  acres  of  public  land  were  sold  in  Mississippi  and 
Alabama  in  the  year  1817.  IniSio  over  90  per  cent  of  our 
cotton  crop  was  raised  in  Virginia,  the  Carolinas,  and  Georgia ; 
but  ten  years  later  more  than  one  third  of  the  crop  was  grown 
in  Alabama,  Mississippi,  Louisiana,  and  Tennessee.  How  to 
take  advantage  of  the  great  market  opening  up  in  the  West  for 
the  manufactures  of  the  East,  and  at  the  same  time  to  bind 
together  the  sections  separated  by  the  mountains,  became  the 
question  of  the  hour.  The  sentiment  of  nationalism  and  the 
thirst  for  profits  combined  to  stimulate  the  demand  for  internal 
improvements.  The  schemes  of  Jefferson  and  Gallatin  for  a 
great  system  of  communication  by  roads  and  canals  between 
the  Eastern  and  the  Western  states  were  taken  up  anew  and 
pushed  vigorously  in  Congress  and  the  state  legislatures. 

A  few  illustrations  will  show  the  need  for  improved  trans- 
portation facilities.  Freight  was  drawn  in  heavy  wagons  by 
horses,  mules,  or  oxen  along  poor  roads  at  incredibly  slow 
speed  and  high  cost.  From  Baltimore  to  Cincinnati  it  took 
a  month  in  transit  and  often  cost  $150  a  ton.  It  cost  so  much 
to  get  a  bushel  of  wheat  from  western  Pennsylvania  or  New 
York  to  the  seaboard  that  the  farmer  had  little  incentive  to 
raise  more  than  enough  to  satisfy  his  own  needs  and  the  scanty 
market  in  his  vicinity.  He  saw  the  major  part  of  the  value 
both  of  the  products  which  he  sent  eastward  and  of  the  imple- 
ments, clothing,  and  household  articles  which  he  bought  in 
return  go  into  the  pockets  of  the  teamsters.  The  roads  in 
Ohio,  Indiana,  and  Kentucky  were  so  poor  that  it  did  not  pay 
to  raise  grain  or  tobacco  fifty  miles  from  a  navigable  river. 
A  representative  from  the  back  country  of  Virginia,  less  than 
one  hundred  miles  from  the  coast,  declared  in  Congress  that 


296  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

it  cost  the  farmer  in  his  district  on  the  average  one  bushel  of 
wheat  to  transport  two  to  tidewater. 

Unless  the  farm  products  of  Ohio  were  to  seek  outlet  through 
the  Lakes  and  the  St.  Lawrence  via  Montreal,  enriching  the 
British  carrying-trade,  and  the  whole  wealth  of  the  Mississippi 
Valley  were  to  go  down  the  river  to  New  Orleans  and  the  Gulf, 
to  be  competed  for  by  British,  French,  and  Spanish  shipping, 
there  must  be  inducement  enough  offered  to  the  farmer  to  get 
his  produce  across  the  mountains  to  New  York,  Philadelphia, 
Baltimore,  and  Charleston.  The  clumsy  method  of  sending 
freight  from  the  Atlantic  ports  to  Louisville,  Cincinnati,  and 
Pittsburgh  via  New  Orleans  could  not  be  continued  with  profit 
to  the  shipper  or  the  receiver.  Peter  B.  Porter  of  New  York, 
in  a  famous  speech  in  Congress  in  1811,  warned  the  country  of 
the  danger  of  the  separation  of  the  Union  into  an  eastern  and 
a  western  section  unless  measures  were  speedily  taken  to  bind 
together  the  farmers  on  one  side  of  the  mountains  and  the 
manufacturers  and  merchants  on  the  other.  The  clauses  of  the 
Constitution  would  be  powerless  to  do  this.  Economic  needs 
were  stronger  than  political  theories:  "It  is  by  producing  a 
mutual  dependence  of  interests  between  these  two  great  sec- 
tions, and  by  this  means  only,  that  the  United  States  can  ever 
be  kept  together."  The  bitter  experiences  of  the  war  added 
force  to  Porter's  warning.  Even  the  fathers  of  the  old  Virginia 
school  began  to  follow,  though  "with  caution  and  good  heed," 
the  lead  of  the  younger  generation  of  Republicans,  like  Porter, 
Clay,  and  Calhoun.  President  Madison,  in  his  last  message  to 
Congress,  urged  "the  expediency  of  exercising  their  existing 
powers,  and  when  necessary  of  resorting  to  the  prescribed  mode 
of  enlarging  them  [by  Constitutional  amendments],  in  order 
to  effectuate  a  comprehensive  system  of  roads  and  canals  such 
as  will  have  the  effect  of  drawing  more  closely  together  every 
part  of  our  country  by  promoting  intercourse  and  improvements 
and  by  increasing  the  share  of  every  part  in  the  common  stock 
of  national  prosperity." 

A  few  days  after  Madison's  message  John  C.  Calhoun  intro- 
duced a  bill  to  commit  the  government  to  a  generous  and  con- 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  297 

tinuous  application  of  the  public  funds  to  the  development  of 
the  West.  He  moved  that  the  $1,500,000  bonus  to  be  paid 
to  the  government  for  the  charter  of  the  new  United  States 
Bank,  together  with  the  annual  interest  on  the  government's 
$7,000,000  of  stock  in  the  Bank,  be  set  apart  as  a  fund  for 
internal  improvements.  Not  alone  the  prosperity  of  the  farm- 
ers and  the  merchants  but  the  strength  and  unity  of  the  country 
were  concerned  in  such  a  policy,  he  urged.  Our  vastness 
exposed  us  to  the  worst  of  all  calamities — disunion. 

We  are  great  and  rapidly,  I  was  about  to  say  fearfully,  growing. 
This  is  our  pride  and  our  danger,  our  weakness  and  our  strength.  .  .  . 
Let  us  bind  the  Republic  together  with  roads  and  canals.  Am  I 
told  that  the  Constitution  does  not  give  Congress  the  necessary 
power?  ...  I  answer,  I  am  no  advocate  of  refined  arguments  on 
the  Constitution !  That  instrument  was  not  intended  as  a  thesis  for 
the  logician  to  exercise  his  ingenuity  on.  It  ought  to  be  construed 
into  plain  good  sense.  .  .  .  "  Congress  shall  have  the  power,"  says  the 
Constitution,  "to  provide  for  the  common  defense  and  general  welfare 
of  the  country"  .  .  .  and  as  roads  and  canals  will  contribute  to 
the  general  welfare,  Congress  may  lay  taxes  and  duties  to  pay  for 
them.  ...  If  we  are  restricted  in  the  use  of  our  money  to  the 
enumerated  powers,  on  what  principle  can  the  purchase  of  Louisiana 
be  justified? 

Calhoun's  bill  passed  the  House  in  February,  1817,  by  the 
close  vote  of  86  to  84,  and  the  Senate  by  20  to  15.  It  reached 
President  Madison  the  day  before  his  retirement  from  office 
(March  3).  With  the  caution  characteristic  of  the  Jeffersonian 
school,  Madison  vetoed  the  bill,  not  because  he  disapproved  of 
its  object,  but  because  of  political  scruples.  He  thought  an 
amendment  to  the  Constitution  necessary  to  enable  Congress  to 
spend  the  public  money  in  such  wholesale  fashion  for  purposes 
not  enumerated  among  its  powers.  His  successor,  Monroe, 
was  equally  interested  in  the  plan  of  improvements  and  equally 
cautious  as  to  the  method  of  putting  it  into  operation.  As  there 
was  no  hope  for  obtaining  the  two-thirds  vote  in  Congress 
to  override  the  presidential  veto,  the  agitation  for  internal 
improvements  lapsed.  When  Monroe  was  succeeded  by  John 


2 98  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Quincy  Adams,  who  was  ready  and  anxious  to  put  his  name  to 
such  bills,  sectional  rivalries  and  jealousies  had  put  an  end 
to  that  generous  enthusiasm  for  national  expansion  at  national 
expense  which  had  marked  the  years  immediately  following  the 
Treaty  of  Ghent.  The  Calhoun  of  1825  would  have  been  the 
last  man  in  the  country  to  deliver  the  speech  of  the  Calhoun 
of  1816. 

Constitutional  scruples  and  economic  theories,  however,  were 
not  the  only  factors  that  entered  into  the  debates  aroused  by 
the  demand  of  the  West  for  recognition  of  its  growing  interests. 
Thirty- four  of  the  41  votes  of  the  New  England  States  in  the 
House,  and  all  but  one  of  their  votes  in  the  Senate,  were  cast 
against  Calhoun's  bill.  Virginia,  Maryland,  and  Delaware  also 
registered  about  three  fourths  of  their  votes  in  the  negative. 
The  84  votes  in  favor  came  almost  wholly  from  the  states  west 
of  the  Alleghenies  and  from  New  York  and  Pennsylvania, 
whose  interest  in  the  region  of  the  Great  Lakes  and  the  Ohio 
valley  was  obvious.  In  short,  it  was  already  a  sectional  issue, 
betraying  the  concern  of  the  seaboard  states,  and  especially  of 
New  England,  lest  the  increasing  West,  by  draining  off  their 
population,  should  displace  their  predominant  influence  in 
the  nation's  politics.  Josiah  Quincy  of  Massachusetts  had 
protested  on  the  floor  of  Congress  against  the  admission  of 
Louisiana  in  1811,  declaring  that  such  an  action  would  be 
" virtually  a  dissolution  of  the  Union"  and  would  justify  the 
secession  of  the  Eastern  states.  "You  have  no  authority/'  he 
continued,  "to  throw  the  rights  and  liberties  and  property  of 
this  people  into  a  hotch-potch  with  the  wild  man  on  the  Missouri 
nor  with  the  mixed,  though  more  respectable,  race  of  Anglo- 
Hispano-Gallo-Americans  who  bask  on  the  sands  at  the  mouth 
of  the  Mississippi."  "What  will  become  of  the  old  United 
States  who  first  entered  into  the  compact  contained  in  the 
Constitution,"  cried  his  colleague  Wheaton,  "and  for  whose 
benefit  alone  that  instrument  was  made  and  executed  ?  Instead 
of  these  new  states  being  annexed  to  us,  we  shall  be  annexed 
to  them,  lose  our  independence,  and  become  altogether  subject 
to  their  control."  Other  New  Englanders  affected  to  despise 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  299 

rather  than  fear  the  voluntary  exiles  who  joined  the  "thieves 
and  insolvents"  in  the  "land  beyond  the  Sabbath."  "The 
people  of  the  Atlantic  states,"  wrote  Flint  in  his  "Recollections 
of  the  Last  Ten  Years"  (1826),  "have  not  yet  recovered  from 
the  horror  inspired  by  the  term  '  Backwoodsman/  This  prej- 
udice is  especially  strong  in  New  England,  and  is  more  or  less 
felt  from  Maine  to  Georgia."  We  shall  note  the  effects  of  this 
social  cleavage  on  our  political  and  economic  history  when  the 
unprecedented  growth  of  our  Western  communities  and  the 
rapid  addition  of  the  states  of  Indiana  (1816),  Mississippi 
(1817),  Illinois  (1818),  Alabama  (1819),  and  Missouri  (1821) 
had  made  it  complete.  Here  it  is  instructive  to  remember 
that  the  vote  on  Calhoun's  Bonus  bill  was  taken  on  the  eve 
of  Monroe's  tour  to  consolidate  the  "era  of  good  feelings." 
The  new  president's  speeches  on  "the  harmony  of  sentiment 
so  extensively  maintained,"  and  his  congratulations,  at  the 
opening  of  his  first  Congress,  on  "the  prosperity  and  happy 
condition  of  a  country  where  local  jealousies  are  rapidly  yield- 
ing to  more  generous,  enlarged,  and  enlightened  views  of  na- 
tional policy,"  must  be  read  in  the  light  of  the  debates  and 
the  vote  on  the  Bonus  bill. 

A  condition  indispensable  to  the  settlement  of  the  West  was 
the  removal  of  the  Indians.  Our  pioneers  pressed  steadily 
into  the  red  man's  hunting-grounds,  making  each  treaty  of  ces- 
sion the  vantage  ground  for  new  encroachments.  The  Indians, 
slow  to  understand  that  the  cessions  excluded  them  from  the 
lands  over  which  their  fathers  had  roamed,  were  strengthened  in 
their  resistance  to  American  advance  by  British  commercial 
agents  who  wished  to  keep  the  fur  trade  in  the  channels  of  the 
Great  Lakes  and  the  St.  Lawrence.  In  General  Harrison's  opin- 
ion, it  was  due  largely  to  British  encouragement  that  Tecumseh 
had  started  the  Indians  of  the  Northwest  on  the  warpath  after 
the  treaty  of  Fort  Wayne  (1809)  had  compelled  them  to  part 
with  some  3,000,000  acres  of  land  in  Indiana.  At  Ghent  the 
British  commissioners  had  demanded  the  erection  of  a  buffer 
Indian  state  to  the  south  of  the  Great  Lakes  and  insisted  that  the 
Indians  be  admitted  as  parties  to  the  treaty.  But  the  Americans 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

were  firm  in  the  defense  of  their  thousands  of  pioneers  who  had 
settled  in  Michigan,  Indiana,  and  Illinois.  They  would  grant 
neither  land  nor  recognition  to  the  Indians,  but  only  complete 
amnesty  on  the  cessation  of  hostilities.  The  British  reluc- 
tantly acquiesced.  After  the  Treaty  of  Ghent  was  concluded, 
the  Indians  of  the  Northwest  held  a  council  at  Detroit  (1815), 
where  Tecumseh's  brother  "the  Prophet"  solemnly  buried  the 
hatchet.  The  succeeding  years  saw  the  rapid  extinguishment 
of  Indian  titles  in  the  Northwest.  More  than  one  half  the  area 
of  Illinois,  one  third  the  area  of  Indiana,  and  nearly  one  quarter 
the  area  of  Ohio  were  ceded  to  the  United  States  between  1816 
and  1819,  with  large  tracts  in  southern  Michigan.  The  new 
states  of  Indiana  and  Illinois  came  into  the  Union  with  all  their 
rich  lands  either  already  under  or  soon  to  pass  under  the 
acknowledged  authority  of  the  white  man. 

While  the  Indians  north  of  the  Ohio  buried  the  hatchet  and 
gave  the  land  peace  for  nearly  a  score  of  years,  the  Treaty  of 
Ghent  only  gave  the  occasion  for  fresh  wars  south  of  the 
Tennessee.  It  will  be  remembered  that  Andrew  Jackson's 
treaty  with  the  Creeks,  after  his  punitive  campaign  of  the 
summer  of  1814,  had  compelled  them  to  surrender  two  thirds 
of  their  land  in  Alabama  (p.  273).  The  exiles  of  the  tribe  took 
refuge  with  the  Seminoles  ("wanderers")  on  the  Florida  strip 
south  of  the  boundary  of  the  United  States.  Here  a  British 
adventurer,  Colonel  Nichols,  without  the  authorization  of  his 
government,  took  under  his  protection  the  Seminoles  with  their 
motley  crew  of  allies,  consisting  of  refugee  Creeks  and  runaway 
negroes  from  the  plantations  of  Georgia.  He  encouraged  the 
Indians  in  the  belief  that  the  Treaty  of  Ghent  restored  the 
lands  which  they  had  surrendered  in  Alabama.  He  built  a 
fort  near  the  mouth  of  the  Appalachicola  and  stocked  it  plenti- 
fully with  arms  and  ammunition.  Then  he  sailed  for  England, 
leaving  negroes  in  possession  of  the  fort,  whence  raiding  parties 
issued  to  destroy  the  crops,  steal  the  cattle,  and  massacre  the 
inhabitants  of  Georgia  and  the  Mississippi  Territory.  Reprisals 
naturally  followed.  The  Americans  threw  a  red-hot  cannon 
ball  into  the  fort,  igniting  several  hundred  barrels  of  gun- 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  301 

powder  and  blowing  the  whole  "garrison "  into  eternity.  A  lit- 
tle later  they  wiped  out  the  Indian  village  of  Fowlton,  whose 
inhabitants  had  fired  on  Major  Triggs.  The  Indians  retaliated 
by  ambushing  a  boatload  of  Americans  on  the  Appalachicola 
River  and  massacring  men,  women,  and  children  with  frightful 
barbarity.  Thus  the  Seminole  War  was  opened  in  the  late 
autumn  of  1817. 

Andrew  Jackson  was  the  major  general  in  command  of  the 
southern  district  of  the  United  States.  A  letter  was  dispatched 
to  him  by  Secretary  of.  War  Calhoun,  on  December  26,  1817, 
ordering  him  to  proceed  to  the  scene  of  disturbances  with  the 
militia  of  Tennessee  and  Georgia,  to  pursue  the  Indians  across 
the  Spanish  border  if  necessary  in  breaking  up  their  marauding 
bands,  but  to  respect  the  strongholds  under  the  command  of 
Spain.  These  orders  crossed  a  letter  from  Jackson  to  Monroe 
advising  the  seizure  of  all  East  Florida  as  a  guaranty  for 
Spain's  reparation  of  the  outrages  committed  on  American  soil 
by  Indians  under  her  nominal  control,  and  signifying  his 
willingness,  on  a  hint  from  the  authorities  at  Washington,  to 
reduce  the  Floridas  to  submission  within  sixty  days.  Monroe, 
having  already  sent  the  orders  of  December  26,  put  aside 
Jackson's  more  drastic  plan  without  a  reply;  but  Jackson 
claimed  that  before  he  had  reached  the  Appalachicola  River  he 
had  received  a  letter  from  Congressman  Rhea  of  Tennessee  with 
the  authorization  of  the  government  to  conquer  the  Floridas. 
Whatever  the  truth  may  be  about  the  correspondence,1  Jack- 
son was  not  the  man  to  fight  an  Indian  war  in  the  cautious 
spirit  of  a  diplomat.  He  not  only  pursued  the  enemy  into 
Spanish  territory,  but  he  seized  the  forts  of  St.  Marks  and 
Pensacola  in  defiance  of  their  Spanish  governors,  garrisoned 
them  with  American  troops,  and  raised  the  American  flag  over 
every  important  post  in  Florida  except  St.  Augustine.2  He 
seized  two  British  subjects,  Arbuthnot  and  Ambrister,  tried 

irThe  student  will  find  a  full  discussion  of  President  Monroe  and  the  Rhea 
letter  in  James  Schouler's  ''History  of  the  United  States,"  Vol.  Ill,  p.  83. 

2  He  ordered  General  Gaines  to  capture  St.  Augustine,  but  the  order  reached 
Washington  and  was  countermanded. 


302  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

them  by  court-martial,  shot  one  and  hanged  the  other  at  the 
yardarm  of  his  own  trading-schooner.  By  the  end  of  May, 
1818,  Jackson  had  finished  his  work  and  was  on  his  way  back 
to  Nashville  to  be  feted  as  the  hero  and  idol  of  the  West.  He 
left  Florida  subdued  to  the  power  of  the  United  States,  but 
his  precipitate  campaign  had  raised  embarrassments  for  the 
administration  which  absorbed  the  attention  of  the  country 
for  months  to  come. 

As  the  reports  of  the  events  in  Florida  reached  Washington 
they  stirred  amazement  and  indignation,  admiration  and  per- 
plexity. Relief  for  the  security  of  our  southern  border  was 
balanced  by  anxiety  for  the  offense  given  to  the  friendly  powers 
of  Spain  and  Great  Britain.  Don  Luis  de  Onis,  the  Spanish 
minister,  in  high  dudgeon,  demanded  the  "prompt  restitution 
of  St.  Marks,  Pensacola,  Barrancas,  and  all  other  places  wrested 
by  General  Jackson  from  the  crown  of  Spain"  and  the  punish- 
ment of  the  general  and  his  officers.  The  President  and  the 
cabinet  agreed  that  Jackson  had  exceeded  his  instructions  of 
December  26,  and  instructions  were  sent  to  the  commanders 
at  the  forts  to  deliver  them  over  on  the  arrival  of  a  Spanish 
force  strong  enough  to  curb  the  Indians.  Monroe  thought  that 
Jackson's  "war  against  Spain"  should  be  disavowed.  Calhoun 
was  in  favor  of  punishing  him  for  insubordination.  John 
Quincy  Adams  was  the  only  member  of  the  cabinet  to  uphold 
the  general's  actions.  He  maintained  that  Jackson  had  not 
waged  war  against  Spain,  but  that  he  had  seized  the  forts  in 
self-defense  in  obedience  to  his  orders  to  pursue  the  Indians 
into  Spanish  territory  and  terminate  their  depredations.  If 
Spanish  authority  had  suffered  in  Florida,  it  was  but  a  just 
retribution  on  Spain  for  failing  to  use  her  power  to  control 
the  Indian  and  negro  hordes,  as  she  had  solemnly  promised  to 
do  in  the  treaty  of  1 795.  When  the  ministry  at  Madrid  renewed 
the  demand  of  De  Onis  for  the  disavowal  of  Jackson's  behavior 
and  the  punishment  of  the  "haughty  invader,"  Adams  sent  an 
ultimatum  instead  of  an  apology  to  the  Spanish  court.  He 
reviewed  the  long  course  of  outrages  on  American  life  and 
property,  permitted  and  even  abetted  by  Spanish  authority; 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  303 

justified  Jackson's  behavior  "by  all  the  laws  of  prudence  and 
humanity";  and  closed  with  a  sharp  summons  to  Spain  to 
cease  to  speak  in  the  language  of  injured  pride  and  to  make 
her  choice  immediately  "either  to  place  in  Florida  a  force 
adequate  at  once  to  the  protection  of  her  territory  and  the  ful- 
filment of  her  engagements,  or  to  cede  to  the  United  States 
a  province  of  which  she  retains  nothing  but  the  nominal  pos- 
session, but  which  is  in  fact  a  derelict  open  to  the  occupancy 
of  every  enemy,  civilized  and  savage,  of  the  United  States." 

King  Ferdinand  of  Spain  was  powerless  to  meet  the  chal- 
lenge. Restored  to  the  throne  of  Madrid  on  the  collapse  of 
Napoleon's  power,  he  found  the  Spanish  colonies  in  America 
in  full  revolt  and  his  own  kingdom  torn  between  the  aristo- 
cratic and  priestly  advocates  of  his  policy  of  reaction  and  the 
adherents  of  the  liberal  "revolutionary"  constitution  of  1812. 
Moreover,  the  British  commercial  interests  were  exerting  pres- 
sure on  Parliament  to  prevent  that  restoration  of  Spain's  colo- 
nial empire  which  would  interrupt  the  lucrative  trade  opened 
to  them  by  the  revolutions  in  Central  and  South  America. 
Since  Florida  was  slipping  from  his  grasp,  Ferdinand  wisely 
decided  to  make  such  profit  as  he  could  out  of  its  loss.  On 
February  22,  1819,  his  minister  at  Washington  signed  a  treaty 
surrendering  East  and  West  Florida  to  the  United  States  on 
condition  that  our  government  would  accept  responsibility  up 
to  $5,000,000  for  claims  of  American  citizens  against  Spain, 
for  depredations  committed  since  the  opening  of  the  Napoleonic 
wars.  By  the  same  treaty  a  line  was  drawn  fixing  the  boundary 
between  the  United  States  and  Spain  on  the  west  and  south 
of  the  Louisiana  Purchase.  It  ran  alternately  north  and  west 
from  the  mouth  of  the  Sabine  River  to  the  point  where  the 
forty-second  parallel  of  latitude  meets  the  Pacific  coast  (see 
map,  p.  319).  The  ratification  of  the  treaty  by  the  Senate 
was  immediate  and  unanimous,  but  the  Spanish  Cortes  with- 
held its  consent  for  over  a  year  and  a  half,  for  fear  it  would 
encourage  the  United  States  to  recognize  the  rebel  governments 
of  Central  and  South  America.  It  was  not  until  July,  1821, 
that  the  province  of  Florida  was  turned  over  to  the  United 


304  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

States  and  erected  into  a  territory.  Andrew  Jackson,  whose 
conduct  in  the  Seminole  War  had  received  full  vindication  at 
the  hands  of  Congress,  in  spite  of  the  opposition  of  Henry  Clay, 
and  whose  name  was  already  being  associated  with  the  White 
House  in  the  mouths  of  the  men  beyond  the  mountains,  was 
made  the  first  governor  of  the  territory. 

Two  points  bearing  on  the  Louisiana  Purchase  deserve  notice 
in  the  important  treaty  of  1819.  By  allowing  West  Florida  to 
be  included  in  the  cession  by  Spain  we  virtually  abandoned  the 
claims  put  forward  and  acted  upon  by  Jefferson,  Madison,  and 
Monroe  since  1804  that  we  had  purchased  that  region  from 
Napoleon  in  1803.  And  by  accepting  the  Sabine  as  the  south- 
western boundary  of  the  Louisiana  Purchase  we  relinquished, 
not  without  regret  on  the  part  of  members  of  the  cabinet  and 
protests  on  the  part,  of  Western  members  of  Congress,  the  far 
better  claim  which  we  had  to  Texas  under  the  terms  of  the 
treaty  of  1803  (see  page  220).  The  "surrender  of  Texas," 
however,  in  spite  of  Clay's  and  Benton's  fervid  oratory,  was  not 
allowed  to  trouble  the  national  rejoicing  over  the  acquisition  of 
the  whole  of  Florida  by  clear  title  from  the  Iberville  to  the 
Atlantic.1  That  acquisition  was  a  great  step  in  the  expansion 
of  our  republic.  It  removed  the  dangers  which  for  years  had 
beset  the  westward  march  of  our  cotton-planters,  and  opened 
an  uninterrupted  communication  from  the  rivers  of  that  region 
to  the  Gulf.  It  made  the  eastern  half  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  an 
American  lake.  Henceforth  the  ships  which  left  the  mouth  of 

1  Clay's  objections  to  the  treaty  were  rightly  interpreted  as  a  rather  factious 
opposition  to  the  administration  which  had  honored  Adams  instead  of  himself 
with  the  office  of  Secretary  of  State;  and  Benton's  impassioned  plea  for  the 
possession  of  the  sparsely  populated  region  beyond  the  Sabine  was  still  looked 
on  as  the  dreaming  of  a  visionary.  Even  Jackson,  according  to  the  testimony  of 
John  Quincy  Adams's  "Diary"  (February  2,  1819),  advised  Monroe  in  a  con- 
versation that  the  American  people  would  be  well  content  to  let  Texas  go  in  lieu 
of  the  acquisition  of  Florida.  Besides,  the  debates  over  the  admission  of  Missouri 
as  a  slave  state  were  beginning  to  convulse  Congress  and  the  country  just  at  the 
moment  when  the  Spanish  treaty  was  concluded.  Monroe  may  well  have  wished 
to  avoid  the  charge  of  favoring  the  interests  of  the  slaveholder  by  adding  to  our 
national  domain  another  vast  region  which  was  certain  in  time  to  be  made  into 
one  or  more  slave  states. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  305 

the  Mississippi  would  have  no  fear  from  pirate  crews  issuing 
from  their  lair  at  the  very  delta,  and  might  coast  along  the 
shore  saluting  the  Stars  and  Stripes  over  the  fortresses  which 
had  harbored  thieves  and  marauders  under  the  flag  of  Spain. 
The  impetus  of  expansion  extended  even  to  the  far  North- 
west; through  that  "empire  of  mountains  and  prairies  where 
the  men  of  the  Stone  Age  watched  with  alarm  the  first  crawling 
waves  of  the  tide  of  civilization  that  was  to  sweep  them  away." 
American  traders  and  explorers,  following  in  the  footsteps  of 
Lewis  and  Clark,  began  to  contest  with  the  British  and  Spanish 
agents  the  monopoly  of  the  trappers'  and  hunters'  rendezvous. 
After  the  unsuccessful  attempt  of  the  Missouri  Fur  Company 
to  maintain  a  post  in  Oregon  in  1810,  John  Jacob  Astor  estab- 
lished the  emporium  of  the  Pacific  Fur  Company  at  Astoria,  at 
the  mouth  of  the  Columbia  River.  He  was  obliged  to  surrender 
it  to  the  British  during  the  War  of  1812,  but  recovered  it  a 
few  years  later  by  the  restitution  clause  of  the  Treaty  of 
Ghent.  The  British,  in  spite  of  Captain  Gray's  discovery  of  the 
Columbia  River,  and  Lewis  and  Clark's  expedition  to  its  mouth, 
had  asserted  a  claim  to  all  the  Pacific  coast  between  Rus- 
sian Alaska  on  the  north  and  Spanish  California  on  the  south. 
But  now  they  consented  tardily  to  recognize  our  interest 
in  Oregon,  the  name  by  which  the  huge  region  lying  west 
of  the  Rockies  between  the  northern  and  southern  limits 
just  described  was  known.  By  a  treaty  negotiated  at  London 
in  iSiS,1  the  boundary  of  Canada  and  the  United  States  west 
of  the  Lake  of  the  Woods  was  fixed  at  the  forty-ninth  parallel 
of  latitude  as  far  west  as  the  "Stony  Mountains"  (see  map, 
p.  319) ;  while  the  Oregon  region  beyond  was  to  be  held  for  a 
period  of  ten  years  by  joint  occupation,  "free  and  open  to  the 

^^The  same  treaty  regulated  the  vexed  question  of  the  American  fishing-rights 
off  the  Canadian  coast,  which  had  been  granted  by  the  treaty  of  1783  but  which 
the  British  contended  had  been  abrogated  by  the  War  of  1812.  Adams  had 
labored  in  vain  at  Ghent  to  secure  the  protection  of  the  New  England  fisher- 
men, whose  exports  in  1814  reached  the  enormous  sum  of  $12,000,000.  The  new 
treaty  of  1818  restored  to  the  United  States  the  right  to  catch,  dry,  and  cure 
fish  on  certain  extensive  coasts  of  Labrador  and  Newfoundland  and  to  use  all 
the  Canadian  ports  in  case  of  distress  or  need  of  food. 


306  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

vessels,  citizens,  and  subjects  of  the  two  powers."  This  joint 
occupation  continued  until  1846,  when  the  dividing  line  of  49° 
was  extended  to  Puget  Sound. 

In  addition  to  the  acts  of  Congress  and  the  treaty  negotiations 
described  in  this  section,  several  important  decisions  of  the 
Supreme  Court  came  to  reenforce  the  sentiment  of  nationalism 
in  these  years.  Down  to  the  Treaty  of  Ghent  our  national 
judiciary  had  shown  but  little  sign  of  the  great  prestige  which 
it  was  destined  to  enjoy  on  our  history.  Only  three  important 
cases  had  come  before  it  in  the  years  1800-1815.  Membership 
in  what  we  now  regard  as  the  most  august  body  in  our  consti- 
tutional system  was  not  very  ardently  sought  for  or  highly 
prized.  John  Jay  regarded  it  as  a  promotion  to  be  transferred 
from  the  Supreme  Court  to  the  governorship  of  New  York. 
Edward  Rutledge  preferred  an  appointment  to  the  bench  of 
South  Carolina.  But  beginning  with  the  year  1816,  a  series 
of  decisions  written  by  Chief  Justice  Marshall  and  his  able 
young  associate  Justice  Story  raised  the  court  to  a  high  emi- 
nence as  the  guardian  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States. 

In  the  case  of  Martin  vs.  Hunter's  Lessee  the  paramount 
authority  of  the  United  States  over  the  highest  tribunal  of  a 
state  was  maintained.  The  twenty-fifth  section  of  the  Judiciary 
Act  of  1789  provided  that  appeals  might  be  taken  from  the 
state  courts  to  the  Supreme  Court  in  cases  involving  the  inter- 
pretation of  the  Constitution.  When  the  Virginia  Court  of  Ap- 
peals, in  1816,  defying  the  act,  refused  to  allow  the  case  to 
go  beyond  its  jurisdiction,  the  Supreme  Court  ruled  that  the 
act  was  constitutional  and  that  the  laws  of  the  states  were 
subject  to  the  appellate  power  of  the  United  States  tribunal 
whenever  the  Constitution,  laws,  or  treaties  of  the  nation  were 
concerned  (i  Wheat.1  304!!).  Three  years  later,  in  the  case 
of  Dartmouth  College  vs.  Woodward  (4  Wheat.  518  ff.)  the 
court  nullified  a  law  of  the  legislature  of  New  Hampshire  alter- 

irrhe  United  States  Reports,  or  cases  decided  by  the  Supreme  Court,  are 
cited  down  to  1875  under  the  name  of  the  reporter  of  the  court  (as  Wheaton, 
Cranch,  Howard,  Wallace,  etc.) .  After  that  date  they  are  cited  by  volume  and 
page  simply  (as  105  U.  S.  654). 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  307 

ing  the  charter  of  the  college  against  the  will  of  the  trustees.  The 
principle  involved  here  was  the  inviolability  of  contracts  (Art.  I, 
sect.  10,  par.  i),  the  court  holding  that  the  charter  of  the 
college  was  a  contract  between  the  state  and  the  trustees.  The 
majority  of  the  court  was  won  to  this  decision  by  the  impas- 
sioned plea  of  Daniel  Webster  in  behalf  of  the  injured  dignity 
of  his  Alma  Mater.  Since  the  state  legislatures  were  the  source 
of  innumerable  charters  to  corporations  of  every  kind,  whose 
general  regulation  was  under  the  police  power  of  the  state, 
this  decision  seemed  to  subject  the  various  industrial,  financial, 
educational,  and  public-service  coporations  of  the  country  to 
the  authority  of  the  national  judiciary.  The  sweeping  effect 
of  the  decision  was  later  modified  by  the  insertion  in  the 
charters  themselves  of  clauses  giving  the  states  the  right  to 
control  corporations  by  legislation  for  the.  safeguarding  of  their 
moral  and  material  interests. 

Most  important  of  all  the  decisions  of  the  court  in  those 
years  was  that  handed  down  in  the  case  of  McCulloch  vs.  Mary- 
land in  1819  (4  Wheat.  316  ff.).  The  National  Bank  was 
unpopular  in  many  quarters.  The  old  Democratic  prejudice 
against  the  Bank  as  a  privileged  corporation  and  an  engine 
of  plutocracy  was  still  strong,  especially  in  the  Western  states. 
Furthermore,  the  Bank  had  been  carelessly  managed  during 
the  first  two  years  of  Madison's  presidency,  and  its  disordered 
condition  was  made  responsible  in  the  minds  of  many  for  the 
financial  panic  which  overtook  the  country  in  1819,  although 
the  panic  was  really  due  to  a  too  rapid  extension  of  enterprise 
and  credit  in  the  enthusiastic  years  which  followed  the  War  of 
1812.  When  the  branches  of  the  United  States  Bank  began  to 
demand  specie  for  the  notes  of  the  state  banks  which  they  held, 
the  legislatures  of  various  states  (North  Carolina,  Ohio,  Ken- 
tucky, Tennessee)  started  a  war  against  the  National  Bank  by 
taxing  the  issues  of  its  branches  within  their  borders.  In  Ohio 
an  officer  of  the  state  actually  drove  up  to  the  door  of  the  United 
States  branch  bank  at  Chillicothe,  entered  the  vaults,  and  seized 
the  amount  of  money  necessary  to  cover  the  tax.  In  Maryland 
the  cashier  of  the  United  States  branch  bank  at  Baltimore, 


3o8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

James  W.  McCulloch,  refused  to  pay  the  tax  on  its  notes  levied 
by  the  legislature  and  carried  his  case  against  the  state  to  the 
Supreme  Court.  The  court  unanimously  agreed  in  the  decision 
written  by  Chief  Justice  Marshall,  which  affirmed  the  right  of 
Congress  to  incorporate  a  bank  under  the  " implied"  power 
of  adopting  "necessary  and  proper"  means  to  carry  out  a 
legitimate  end  (Art.  I,  sect.  8,  pars,  i,  2,  5,  12,  13,  18)  and  to 
establish  in  the  states  branches  which  should  be  immune  from 
taxation  except  for  the  regular  property  tax  on  their  buildings 
and  land.  "The  power  to  tax,"  said  Marshall,  "is  the  power  to 
destroy."  If  the  states  could  levy  a  small  tax  on  the  Bank 
issues,  they  could  also  levy  a  large  one  and  so  drive  the  Bank 
out  of  business. 

These  famous  decisions,  maintaining  the  competence  of  the 
national  court  to  interpret  the  extent  of  the  powers  of  the 
national  government,  were  alarming  to  the  old-school  Repub- 
licans, who  insisted  on  the  strict  limitation  of  Congress  to  the 
powers  explicitly  granted  to  it  by  the  Constitution.  Jefferson, 
who,  since  his  retirement  from  the  presidency,  had  tended  to 
revert  to  his  earlier  championship  of  states'  rights  and  distrust 
of  the  "general  government,"  led  the  attack  on  these  "usurp- 
ing" doctrines  of  his  political  enemy  John  Marshall.  "The 
great  object  of  my  fear,"  he  wrote  to  Thomas  Rich  in  the  year 
1820,  "is  the  federal  judiciary.  That  body,  gaining  ground 
step  by  step,  and  holding  what  it  gains,  is  ingulphing  insidiously 
the  special  [state]  governments  into  the  jaws  of  that  which 
feeds  them."  But  the  process  of  centralization,  so  obvious  in 
the  acts  of  Congress  and  the  conduct  of  the  executive,  could 
not  be  stopped  at  the  portals  of  the  Supreme  Court  chamber. 
It  was  all  a  part  of  the  process  of  expansion  and  nationalism 
traced  in  this  section.  It  was  the  expression  of  the  spirit  of  the 
new  nation. 

There  were  numerous  other  signs  in  our  political  and  eco- 
nomic life,  and  even  in  our  literary  and  religious  life,  that  bore 
witness  to  the  new  spirit :  the  remodeling  of  state  constitutions 
along  more  democratic  lines,  the  reduction  in  the  price  of  pub- 
lic lands,  the  completion  of  the  first  section  of  the  national 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  309 

Cumberland  Road,  the  breaking  down  of  the  political  and  so- 
cial power  of  the  old  Calvinistic  orthodoxy,  the  beginnings  of 
a  distinctly  American  school  of  literature,  the  rise  of  a  group 
of  nationally  minded  statesmen  and  orators  like  Webster,  Ben- 
ton,  Clay,  Calhoun,  and  Everett.  On  April  13,  1818  (Jefferson's 
birthday!)  our  new  national  flag,  with  its  thirteen  alternate 
stripes  of  white  and  red  and  its  twenty  white  stars  in  an  azure 
field,  was  raised  over  the  Capitol.1  It  was  a  happy  symbol  of 
the  new  America. 


THE  MISSOURI  COMPROMISE  AND  THE  MONROE  DOCTRINE 

The  same  wave  of  westward  migration  which  filled  the  land 
between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  Mississippi  with  a  solid  block 
of  states  in  the  four  years  succeeding  the  Treaty  of  Ghent  did 
not  stop  at  the  banks  of  the  great  river.  Timothy  Flint,  a 
trading  preacher  from  New  England,  tells  in  his  delightful 
" Recollections"  how  he  stood  on  the  heights  of  St.  Charles  on 
the  lower  Missouri  in  1818  and  watched  the  immigrants  cross 
the  ferry  of  the  Mississippi  with  their  "4  and  6  horse  waggons," 
their  cattle  "with  a  hundred  bells,"  their  expectant  families 
and  excited  negroes — headed  for  the  land  of  boundless  promise. 
The  territory  of  Missouri  had  been  organized  when  Louisiana 
was  admitted  to  the  Union  in  1812.  Its  population  of  some 
20,000,  scattered  among  a  score  of  river  settlements,  was  a 
medley  of  French  hunters  and  trappers,  shrewd  Yankee  ped- 
dlers, and  solid  German  farmers  dwelling  in  solid  stone  houses. 
When  the  peace  of  Ghent  removed  the  Indian  danger  from  the 
frontier,  the  territory  began  to  fill  up  rapidly.  Before  the  close 
of  the  decade  the  population  of  20,000  had  grown  to  66,500, 
including  about  10,000  slaves  brought  by  the  farmers  of  Ken- 

1By  act  of  April  4,  1818,  the  flag  designed  by  Betsy  Ross  for  the  thirteen 
states  in  1777,  and  slightly  modified  in  1794,  was  altered  to  fit  our  growth.  The 
act  provided  that  a  new  star  be  added  to  the  blue  field  on  the  Fourth  of  July 
succeeding  the  admission  of  each  new  state  to  the  Union.  At  first  the  cluster  of 
white  stars  was  arranged  in  the  form  of  a  large  star,  but  later  the  stars  were 
arranged  in  horizontal  lines. 


310  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

tucky  and  Tennessee.  Over  50  steamboats  were  running  on  the 
Mississippi  and  doing  a  business  of  $2,500,000  a  year.  The 
settlements  had  spread  60  miles  and  more  up  the  Missouri  val- 
ley to  Boone's  Lick,  whose  name  celebrated  the  pioneer  of 
trans- Allegheny  migration.  The  climate  was  wholesome  as  con- 
trasted with  the  malarial  regions  to  the  south.  All  the  cereals 
grew  in  abundance;  the  corn  yielding  90  bushels  to  the  acre. 
The  southern  part  of  the  territory  was  suitable  for  cotton 
culture.  Deposits  of  lead  and  salt  were  worked  with  profit. 

In  March,  1818,  the  enterprising  people  of  the  Missouri 
territory  presented  to  Congress  through  their  delegate,  John 
Scott,  a  petition  praying  for  admission  to  the  Union  as  a  state. 
The  matter  went  over  to  the  next  session  of  Congress,  where  a 
similar  petition  was  read  on  December  18,  1818.  The  following 
February  the  House  began  the  debate  on  the  petition,  and 
James  Tallmadge  of  New  York  precipitated  the  famous  Mis- 
souri controversy  by  offering  an  amendment  "that  the  further 
introduction  of  slavery  or  involuntary  servitude  be  prohibited, 
except  for  the  punishment  of  crimes  whereof  the  party  shall 
have  been  duly  convicted,  and  that  all  children  born  within  the 
said  state  after  the  admission  thereof  into  the  Union  shall  be 
free,  but  may  be  held  to  service  until  the  age  of  twenty-five 
years."  The  House,  "after  an  interesting  and  pretty  wide  de- 
bate," adopted  the  Tallmadge  amendment  by  a  vote  of  87  to  76, 
but  the  Senate  rejected  it.  The  House  refused  to  recede  from 
its  position,  and  the  Fifteenth  Congress  expired,  March  3,  1819, 
with  the  two  Houses  in  deadlock  on  the  question  of  slavery  in 
the  proposed  new  state  of  Missouri,  but  with  little  surmise  that 
they  had  exchanged  the  first  shots  in  a  conflict  which  was  to 
plunge  the  country  into  civil  war. 

Negro  slavery  had  been  introduced  into  the  colony  of  James- 
town in  1619.  The  few  thousand  slaves  brought  over  in  the 
seventeenth  century  to  work  in  the  tobacco  and  rice  fields  of 
Virginia  and  the  Carolinas,  or  to  serve  as  coachmen  and  butlers 
in  the  families  of  the  rich  merchants  of  the  North,  seem  to  have 
been  no  cause  of  offense  except  to  the  little  group  of  Quakers 
or  to  a  sensitive  philanthropist  here  and  there.  But  the  eight- 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  311 

eenth  century  saw  a  great  change  in  the  attitude  of  the  colo- 
nists toward  slavery.  A  clause  in  the  Treaty  of  Utrecht  (the 
"Asiento")  gave  to  England  the  monopoly  of  the  slave  trade 
from  the  shores  of  Africa  to  the  Spanish  colonies  of  the  New 
World  (1713).  There  was  an  unlimited  market  on  the  Guinea 
coast  for  the  rum  distilled  in  New  England,  and  there  was  an 
unlimited  supply  of  sugar  and  molasses  in  the  West  Indies  for 
the  manufacture  of  more  rum.  The  unoffending  African  served 
as  the  medium  of  exchange  in  the  profitable  transaction.  Sold 
by  their  captor  chiefs  for  rum,  they  were  packed  into  the  sti- 
fling holds  of  wooden  vessels  and  brought  through  the  equatorial 
seas  to  the  West  Indies,  with  all  the  horrors  of  the  "middle 
passage."  Rich  merchants,  high  nobles,  and  even  members  of 
the  royal  family  were  interested  in  this  nefarious  traffic.  The 
stimulus  of  greed,  added  to  the  natural  development  of  our 
plantations,  forced  the  rate  of  slave  importation  higher  and 
higher.  Several  times  during  the  eighteenth  century  the  legis- 
latures of  the  Southern  colonies,  notably  of  Virginia,  under  the 
double  impetus  of  humanitarian  sentiment  and  concern  for 
the  increasing  growth  of  an  unassimilable  element  in  their 
population,  passed  laws  restricting  the  importation  of  African 
negroes,  but  the  crown  of  England  vetoed  these  laws.  "We  can- 
not allow  the  colonies,"  said  Lord  Dartmouth  in  1774,  "to 
check  or  discourage  in  any  degree  a  traffic  so  beneficial  to  the 
nation."  On  the  eve  of  the  American  Revolution  there  were 
more  than  half  a  million  slaves  in  the  colonies ; 1  and  how  seri- 
ously the  colonies  then  regarded  the  traffic  is  shown  by  the 
resolution  of  the  first  Continental  Congress  in  October,  1774, 
to  the  effect  that  no  more  slaves  should  be  imported .  after 
December,  and  that  whoever  broke  this  resolution  should  be 
"universally  condemned  as  an  enemy  of  American  liberty." 
It  is  well  known,  too,  that  Thomas  Jefferson,  in  the  original 
draft  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  included  among  the 
grievances  against  King  George  a  scathing  indictment  of  his 

1Our  first  census,  of  1790,  gives  the  number  of  slaves  as  697,897,  of  whom 
40,370  were  north  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line.  Of  the  657,527  in  the  South  the 
states  of  Virginia,  Maryland,  and  the  Carolinas  held  604,129. 


312  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

encouragement  of  "this  execrable  commerce."  Jefferson  sup- 
pressed the  clause,  however,  out  of  deference  to  the  feelings  of 
the  delegates  from  South  Carolina  and  Georgia.  The  economic 
advantages  of  slavery  in  the  lower  South  already  outweighed 
humanitarian  considerations,  leaving  the  more  noble-minded 
masters  in  a  state  of  reluctant  acquiescence.1 

Slavery  was  warmly  debated  in  the  Constitutional  Conven- 
tion of  1787,  and  although  the  words  "slaves"  and  "slavery" 
were  not  mentioned  in  the  Constitution,  the  institution  was 
recognized  and  treated  with  considerable  indulgence.  Three 
fifths  of  the  slaves  were  added  to  the  white  population  to  make 
the  federal  apportionment  for  representation,  presidential  elec- 
tors, and  direct  taxes.  Congress  was  forbidden  to  interfere 
with  the  importation  of  slaves  for  a  period  of  twenty  years 
after  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution.  The  return  to  their 
masters  of  fugitive  slaves  who  had  escaped  into  the  free  states 
was  guaranteed.  In  accordance  with  the  last-mentioned  clause 
a  Fugitive  Slave  Act  was  passed  by  Congress  in  1793.  This 
recognition  of  slavery  by  the  Constitution  furnished  the 
Southerners  of  a  later  day  with  a  good  argument  in  favor  of 
slavery  as  a  national  institution ;  but  the  antislavery  advocates, 
like  Chase,  Seward,  and  Lincoln,  went  back  to  the  resolution  of 
1774  and  to  the  principles  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
to  prove  that  our  Union  was  formed  by  patriots  who  believed 
that  "all  men  are  created  equal"  and  endowed  with  liberty  as 
an  "unalienable  right." 

Most  important  of  all  the  questions  concerning  slavery  was 
that  of  its  extension  to  the  great  dominion  beyond  the  Al- 
legheriies,  ceded  to  us  by  England  in  the  treaty  of  1783.  The 
very  next  year  Thomas  Jefferson  submitted  to  Congress  an  or- 
dinance for  the  government  of  this  territory,  forever  forbidding 

1  Patrick  Henry  of  Virginia  wrote  to  a  Quaker  friend  in  1773 :  "Every  think- 
ing honest  man  rejects  it  [slavery]  in  speculation,  but  how  few  in  practice.  .  .  . 
Would  any  one  believe  that  I  am  master  of  slaves  of  my  own  purchase?  I  am 
drawn  along  by  the  general  inconvenience  of  living  without  them.  I  will  not,  I 
cannot,  justify  it.  However  culpable  my  conduct,  I  will  so  far  pay  my  devoir  to 
virtue  as  to  own  the  excellence  and  rectitude  of  her  precepts,  and  lament  my 
want  of  conformity  to  them." 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  313 

slavery  within  its  borders.  The  antislavery  clause  of  Jefferson's 
ordinance  was  lost  by  the  vote  of  a  single  state.  Three  years 
later  Congress  passed  the  famous  Northwest  Ordinance  (con- 
firmed by  an  act  of  the  first  Congress  under  the  Constitution), 
which  excluded  slavery  from  all  our  territory  north  of  the 
Ohio  River.  The  states  formed  out  of  this  territory  (Ohio  in 
1803,  Indiana  in  1816,  Illinois  in  1818,  Michigan  in  1837,  and 
Wisconsin  in  1848)  all  came  into  the  Union  free;  but  south  of 
the  Ohio  the  states  formed  from  lands  ceded  by  Virginia,  the 
Carolinas,  and  Georgia  (Kentucky  in  1792,  Tennessee  in  1796, 
Mississippi  in  1817,  and  Alabama  in  1819)  were  naturally  slave- 
holding.  Thus  the  Ohio  River  formed  the  continuation  of 
Mason  and  Dixon's  line  as  the  boundary  between  slavery 
and  freedom. 

For  several  reasons  the  application  of  Missouri  for  state- 
hood in  1818  marked  a  critical  moment  in  our  history.  In  the 
first  place,  the  area  of  the  proposed  state  lay  wholly  west  of 
the  Mississippi,  land  never  owned  nor  claimed  by  any  of  the 
original  states  but  purchased  from  Napoleon  by  the  national 
government.  Part  of  this  area  was  above  and  part  below  the 
mouth  of  the  Ohio,  and  it  had  received  immigrants  from  both 
the  free  and  the  slave  states.  Its  admission  would  form  a  prece- 
dent for  the  rest  of  the  immense  Louisiana  Purchase  territory.1 
Furthermore,  the  free  and  slave  states  were  exactly  balanced 
(eleven  each),  which  meant  equal  weight  in  the  Senate.  Since 
the  North  was  increasingly  predominant  in  the  House,  the 
Senate  had  to  preserve  this  parity  in  order  to  protect  its  inter- 
ests.2 Again,  the  economic  advantage  of  slavery  to  the  South 
appeared  immensely  greater  in  1820  than  at  the  time  of  the 

aTo  be  sure,  the  extreme  southern  part  of  the  territory  had  been  admitted  as 
the  state  of  Louisiana  in  1812,  with  its  existing  institution  of  slavery.  But  the 
case  of  Missouri  was  different  in  that  it  was  a  territory  built  up  chiefly  by 
emigration  from  the  United  States. 

2  The  population  of  the  sections  of  the  country  north  and  south  of  Mason  and 
Dixon's  line  was  nearly  equal  by  the  first  census,  of  1790  (1,968,455  to  1,961,327). 
But  by  1820  the  North  had  5,132,372,  while  the  South,  counting  three  fifths  of 
the  slaves,  had  only  3,312,244.  The  representation  in  the  House  in  1820  was  104 
from  the  free  states  and  79  from  the  slave  states. 


314  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

debates  on  the  Constitution.  The  results  of  the  invention  of 
the  cotton  gin  by  Eli  Whitney  in  1793,  which  multiplied  over 
three  hundredfold  the  productive  power  of  the  slave  in  cleaning 
the  seed  from  the  cotton  fiber,  were  fully  manifest  now.  In 
1791,  when  Hamilton  made  his  famous  report  on  manufactures, 
the  South  exported  cotton  for  the  first  time— a  meager  20,000 
pounds.  The  crop  grew  to  20,000,000  pounds  a  decade  later, 
and  by  1820  it  reached  160,000,000  pounds.1  Such  figures  show 
that  the  destiny  of  the  South  was  fixed  in  the  production  of  the 
staple  crop  of  cotton,  to  the  exclusion  of  manufactures  and 
diversified  farming.  They  show  also  what  a  constant  demand 
there  was  for  new  lands  and  new  hands  for  the  cotton  culture. 
The  lands  were  found  in  abundance  in  the  new  states  of  the 
West,  but  neither  the  natural  increase  among  the  slaves  nor  the 
importation  of  large  numbers  of  negroes  bred  in  the  border 
states  sufficed  for  the  labor  of  the  cotton  fields.  Some  thousands 
of  slaves  were  smuggled  into  the  Southern  ports  from  Africa 
each  year,  in  spite  of  the  prohibition  of  the  act  of  Congress  of 
1807,  and  no  jury  in  the  South  could  be  found  to  convict  the 
offending  captains  and  owners  of  the  vessels. 

The  zeal  to  reserve  the  land  west  of  the  Mississippi  for  free 
states  alone,  to  keep  the  balance  against  slavery  in  Congress 
and  to  rebuke  the  South  for  the  open  violation  of  the  law  for 
which  all  her  representatives  and  senators  had  voted  a  dozen 
years  before,  gave  a  vehemence  to  the  words  of  the  Northern 
orators,  like  King,  Taylor,  and  Tallmadge,  which  had  not  been 
heard  in  Congress  since  the  days  of  Washington  and  Adams, 
when  Federalist  "Anglomen"  and  "Jacobinical"  Republicans 
flayed  one  another ;  while  the  Southern  speakers,  like  Pinkney, 
Cobb,  and  McLean,  met  defiance  with  defiance  and  threat  with 
threat.  Jefferson  said  that 'the  debates  startled  him  like  the 
sound  of  the  fire  bells  at  night.  "The  Missouri  question  is  the 

1The  importance  of  the  West  in  the  growth  of  the  cotton  industry  is  seen  by 
the  following  figures.  In  1801  only  2  per  cent  of  the  crop  was  grown  west  of 
the  Alleghenies;  in  1821  the  states  of  Alabama,  Tennessee,  Mississippi,  and  Loui- 
siana produced  34.7  per  cent  of  the  173,000,000  pounds,  and  in  1834  these  same 
states  produced  60.8  per  cent  of  the  456,000,000  pounds  grown. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  315 

most  portentous  one  which  has  ever  threatened  the  Union/'  he 
wrote;  "in  the  gloomiest  hour  of  the  Revolutionary  War  I 
never  had  any  apprehensions  equal  to  those  which  I  feel  from 
this  source." 

The  deadlock  over  the  Tallmadge  amendment,  just  as  the  Fif- 
teenth Congress  came  to  a  close,  threw  the  country  into  a  state 
of  great  excitement.  Resolutions  for  and  against  the  restric- 
tion of  slavery  in  Missouri  were  passed  by  various  state  legis- 
latures ;  petitions  came  to  Washington  from  societies,  churches, 
and  clubs;  the  press  was  filled  with  controversial  articles.  It 
seemed  as  though  all  other  national  questions — the  tariff,  in- 
ternal improvements,  the  currency,  and  the  panic — had  been 
forgotten.  When  the  new  Congress  met  in  December,  1819,  the 
debates  were  resumed,  the  language  growing  more  passionate 
and  threatening  as  the  issue  became  more  clearly  drawn — the 
extension  or  the  limitation  of  slave  soil.  The  North  argued  that 
the  clause  in  the  Constitution  reading  "New  states  may  be 
admitted  by  Congress  into  the  Union"  conferred  on  Congress 
the  power  to  determine  on  what  conditions  it  would  admit  new 
states  to  the  Union.  Moreover,  several  states  had  already  been 
admitted  under  various  restrictions  in  regard  to  slaveholding, 
the  taxation  of  lands,  the  navigation  of  rivers,  and  interference 
with  civil  or  religious  liberty.  The  South  replied  that  such 
restrictions,  except  as  they  were  expressly  contained  in  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,  were  invalid,  and  that  for 
Congress  to  impose  terms  of  entrance  on  a  state  at  will  was  to 
reduce  such  a  state  to  a  mere  province  of  the  central  govern- 
ment. It  was  as  an  equal  in  a  union  of  equal  states  that 
Missouri  sought  admission;  she  must  be  as  free  as  South 
Carolina  or  Massachusetts  to  determine  her  domestic  institu- 
tions. Otherwise,  she  came  in,  as  William  Pinkney  of  Mary- 
land said,  "  shorn  of  her  beams,  with  the  iron  collar  of  servitude 
about  her  neck  instead  of  the  civic  crown  of  republican  freedom 
upon  her  brow."  Congress  might  indeed  refuse  admission  to 
Missouri  as  long  as  it  wished,  but  when  the  state  came  in,  it 
must  be  with  her  sovereign  rights  unimpaired.  This  was  the 
crux  of  the  controversy,  though  other  arguments  were  not  lack- 


316  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ing.  When  the  South  pointed  to  the  third  article  of  the 
Louisiana  Purchase  treaty  of  1803,  by  which  we  promised  that 
the  inhabitants  of  the  territory  should  be  incorporated  into  the 
United  States  as  soon  as  possible,  and  in  the  meantime  be  "  pro- 
tected in  the  free  enjoyment  of  their  liberty,  property,  and  the 
religion  which  they  profess,"  Rufus  King  replied  that  inter- 
national law  did  not  recognize  slaves  as  "property"  nor  include 
them  as  such  in  treaty  stipulations.  When  Henry  Clay  argued 
that  admitting  slavery  into  Missouri  would  "not  add  to  the  slave 
population  a  single  soul,"  but  would  "dilute"  the  evil  by  spread- 
ing it  over  a  wider  area  and  "alleviate  the  unhappy  lot  of  those 
hemmed  in  within  too  narrow  lines,"  the  Northern  speakers 
rebuked  the  sophistry  which  recommended  the  extermination  of 
the  poisonous  weed  by  scattering  its  seeds  broadcast. 

There  seemed  to  be  little  hope  of  a  peaceable  settlement  of 
the  Missouri  question.  The  South  would  not  give  up  the  consti- 
tutional right  of  a  new  state  to  enter  the  Union  on  an  equal 
footing  with  the  other  states,  and  the  North  would  not  give 
up  its  determination  to  prevent  the  spread  of  slavery  beyond 
the  Mississippi.  One  section  was  accused  of  concealing  beneath 
its  zeal  for  the  doctrine  of  states'  rights  the  sinister  purpose  of 
opening  new  territory  to  slavery ;  the  other  section  was  accused 
of  stirring  up  moral  indignation  against  slavery  as  a  mere  polit- 
ical ruse  for  restoring  the  Federalists  to  power  and  keeping 
Southern  interests  in  permanent  subjection  in  both  Houses  of 
Congress.  The  patient,  imperturbable  Monroe  was  confident 
that  a  compromise  could  be  found,  but  few  of  our  leading 
statesmen  were  so  optimistic.  John  Quincy  Adams  confided 
his  apprehension  of  civil  strife  to  his  "Diary,"  with  the  comment 
that  if  the  battle  must  come  it  had  better  come  on  this  issue. 
Henry  Clay  feared  that  in  five  years  the  Union  would  be  split, 
and  declared  that  the  words  "civil  war"  and  "disunion"  were 
uttered  "almost  without  an  emotion."  Cobb  of  Georgia  warned 
Tallmadge  that  he  had  "kindled  a  fire  ...  which  only  seas 
of  blood  could  extinguish."  However,  a  way  of  compromise 
was  found. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  317 

The  province  of  Maine,  which  had  been  a  part  of  Massa- 
chusetts since  its  purchase  from  the  heirs  of  Gorges  in  1677, 
had  long  been  eager  to  be  formed  into  a  separate  state.  It 
finally  won  the  consent  of  the  legislature  of  Massachusetts,  and 
at  the  opening  of  Congress  in  December,  1819,  applied,  with  a 
free-state  constitution  already  formed,  for  admission  to  the 
Union.  The  House  promptly  passed  the  bill  admitting  Maine. 
The  Senate  committee,  however,  added  to  the  Maine  bill  a 
provision  for  the  admission  of  Missouri  without  any  restriction 
in  regard  to  slavery.  After  an  exciting  debate  of  a  month  in 
the  Senate,  Thomas  of  Illinois  proposed  as  an  amendment  to 
the  part  of  the  bill  touching  Missouri  that  slavery  be  forever 
excluded  from  all  the  Louisiana  Purchase  territory  north  of 
latitude  36°  30'  (the  southern  boundary  of  Missouri),  except  in 
the  proposed  state  of  Missouri  itself.  Fourteen  of  the  twenty- 
two  senators  from  the  slave  states  voted  for  the  Thomas 
amendment.  The  House  at  first  rejected  the  Thomas  amend- 
ment, repassing  the  bill  for  the  admission  of  Missouri  with  the 
Tallmadge  amendment  by  a  vote  of  91  to  82  ;  but  after  a  con- 
ference with  the  Senate  enough  Northern  votes  were  won  to 
carry  the  Thomas  clause.  The  final  vote  in  the  House  on  the 
Compromise  was  90  to  87.  The  fourteen  Congressmen  from 
the  free  states  who  joined  the  unanimous  delegation  of  South- 
erners in  voting  for  the  Missouri  Compromise  were  actuated  by 
honorable  motives,1  but  the  caustic  John  Randolph  contemptu- 
ously dubbed  them  "dough-faces" — a  name  thereafter  applied 
to  Northern  men  who  supported  the  proslavery  measures  of 
the  South.  On  March  3,  1820,  President  Monroe  signed  the 
bill  admitting  Maine  as  a  free  state,  and  three  days  later  the 

1They  believed  that  compromise  was  necessary  to  save  the  Union,  and  that 
the  South  had  shown  great  generosity  in  accepting  the  Thomas  amendment, 
which  closed  nine  tenths  of  the  Louisiana  Purchase  territory  to  slavery.  Further- 
more, the  consent  of  Massachusetts  to  the  separation  of  Maine  was  conditioned 
on  the  admission  of  Maine  to  the  Union  before  March  4,  1820.  Perhaps  some  of 
the  Northern  Republicans  were  induced  to  vote  for  the  Compromise,  by  the 
fear  that  the  Federalists,  led  by  Rufus  King,  would  get  back  into  power  on  the 
issue  of  slavery  restriction. 


318  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

bill  authorizing  Missouri  to  frame  a  constitution  without  any 
restriction  of  slavery.1 

The  full  importance  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  appears 
only  in  the  light  of  the  history  of  the  generation  following.  For 
the  moment  it  seemed  to  have  settled  the  controversy  over 
slavery  and  thwarted  the  formation  of  new  political  parties 
on  that  issue.2  Regarded  as  a  cowardly  surrender  of  principles 
by  zealots  on  both  sides  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line,  like 
Tallmadge  and  Randolph,  the  Compromise  stimulated  aboli- 
tionist sentiment  in  the  North  and  fortified  the  doctrine  of 
states'  rights  in  the  South.  It  revived  the  agitation  over  the 
ethics  of  slaveholding,  which  had  been  rather  in  abeyance  since 
the  debates  of  the  Constitutional  Convention  and  thoroughly 
quieted  with  the  passage  of  the  law  forbidding  the  slave  trade. 
It  revealed  with  startling  clearness  to  the  North,  where  slavery 
was  rapidly  nearing  extinction,  how  firmly  the  economic  conse- 
quences of  the  invention  of  the  cotton  gin  (enormously  acceler- 
ated production,  clamor  for  new  lands,  trebling  of  the  price 
of  sound  negroes)  had  fixed  the  institution  on  the  South.  It 
connected  the  question  of  the  restriction  or  extension  of  slavery 
with  westward  expansion.  By  sanctioning  the  line  of  36°  30'  be- 
tween slavery  and  freedom  in  our  Western  territory,  it  empha- 


aThe  actual  admission  of  Missouri  was  delayed  for  more  than  a  year  because 
the  House  objected  to  clauses  in  the  proposed  constitution  which  discriminated 
against  free  negroes.  Henry  Clay  engineered  the  final  compromise,  by  which 
Missouri  was  admitted  (August  10,  1821)  on  agreeing  that  no  clause  of  her  con- 
stitution should  ever  "be  construed  to  authorize  the  passage  of  any  laws  ...  by 
which  any  citizen  of  either  of  the  states  of  the  Union  shall  be  excluded  from  the 
enjoyment  of  any  of  the  privileges  and  immunities  to  which  said  citizen  is  en- 
titled under  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States." 

2 John  Quincy  Adams  writes  in  his  "Diary"  (Vol.  VI,  p.  529):  "The  discus- 
sion of  the  Missouri  question  .  .  .  revealed  the  basis  for  a  new  organization  of 
parties.  Here  was  a  new  party  ready  formed  .  .  .  threatening  in  its  immediate 
effect  that  southern  domination  which  had  swayed  the  Union  for  the  last  20 
years."  All  through  the  long  period  of  electioneering  for  the  presidential  cam- 
paign of  1824  there  were  fears  among  the  followers  of  Clay  north  of  the  Ohio 
that  the  Missouri  question  would  be  revived  and  that  under  the  slogan  "No 
slavery "  the  Northwest  would  be  stampeded  to  Adams. 


THE  TRANS-MISSISSIPPI  COUNTRY  AND  THE  MISSOURI  COMPROMISE 


320  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

sized  the  sectional  rivalry  and  helped  to  detach  the  new  states 
of  the  Northwest  (Indiana  and  Illinois)  from  their  sympathy 
with  the  agrarian  communities  of  the  South  and  join  them  to 
the  manufacturing  and  commercial  communities  of  the  East. 
The  free-soil  motive  became  for  the  first  time  an  integrat- 
ing principle  from  Boston  Harbor  to  the  banks  of  the  upper 
Mississippi. 

Contemporary  statesmen  maintained  that  the  Missouri  Com- 
promise saved  the  Union,  but  it  is  not  difficult  for  us  to  see  the 
germs  of  disunion  in  the  measure.  It  deliberately  divided  the 
national  house  against  itself.  The  control  of  the  territories  by 
Congress  was  not  the  point  at  issue.  All  the  members  of 
Monroe's  cabinet,  including  Calhoun,  agreed  to  that  doctrine. 
Every  Southerner  in  the  House  voted  for  it  in  the  Missouri  bill. 
The  controverted  question  was  whether  Congress  could  put 
restrictions  on  a  new  state  about  to  enter  the  Union.  The 
Tallmadge  amendment  embodied  that  doctrine.  It  failed  to 
pass  the  Senate,  by  a  vote  of  16  to  22,  four  Northern  men  voting 
against  it.  Had  these  men  from  Illinois,  Massachusetts,  and 
Pennsylvania  supported  the  amendment,  it  would  have  passed 
the  Senate  and  in  all  probability  have  been  signed  by  the 
President.  Congress  then,  with  its  increasing  free-soil  repre- 
sentation, could  have  made  the  prohibition  of  slavery  the  con- 
dition for  the  admission  of  future  states  until  there  were  enough 
free  states  in  the  Union  to  secure  the  passage  of  an  amendment 
to  the  Constitution  abolishing  slavery.  This  program,  to  be 
sure,  might  have  met  with  opposition  and  been  thwarted  in 
ways  which  we  cannot  see,  but  its  initial  failure  in  the  case  of 
Missouri  wrecked  whatever  chance  there  was  for  the  peaceable 
abolition  of  slavery.  This  is  the  immense  significance  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise.  "It  contributed  towards  making  the  war 
of  1 86 1  an  historic  necessity." 

It  seems  at  first  sight  strange  that  the  very  year  which  wit- 
nessed the  final  stormy  debates  on  the  Missouri  Compromise 
should  have  marked  also  the  culmination  of  the  "era  of  good 
feelings,"  in  the  virtually  unanimous  reelection  of  James  Monroe 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  321 

to  the  presidency.1  The  logical  outcome  of  the  Missouri  strug- 
gle would  have  been  the  formation  of  a  proslavery  states'-rights 
party  in  the  South  to  oppose  the  free-soil  trend  of  the  North. 
Yet  such  a  party  was  some  years  in  forming.  Attachment  to  the 
Union  was  strong  on  both  sides  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line. 
The  generous  enthusiasm  with  which  statesmen  of  both  sections 
had  given  themselves  to  plans  for  national  aggrandizement 
after  the  War  of  1812  was  still  working  powerfully.  The  Vir- 
ginian president  continued  to  recommend  protection  for  manu- 
factures in  his  messages  of  1821,  1822,  and  1823,  and  he  was 
supported  not  only  by  Henry  Clay  of  Kentucky  but  also  by 
Senator  Hayne  of  South  Carolina.  Although  the  comprehensive 
bill  for  the  upkeep  of  the  national  Cumberland  Road  was  vetoed 
by  Monroe  in  the  spring  of  1822,  the  opposition  proceeded 
rather  from  scruples  as  to  the  powers  of  Congress  under  the 
Constitution  to  foster  "internal  improvements"  than  from  any 
realization  that  the  interests  of  the  South  were  opposed  to  the 
encouragement  of  a  surplus  in  the  Treasury  to  be  expended  on 
the  development  of  a  free  Northwest.2  Finally,  the  years  im- 
mediately following  the  Missouri  controversy  were  occupied 
with  the  discussion  of  important  foreign  questions,  whose  effect 
is  always  to  sink  domestic  discord  in  the  larger  issue  of  national 
safety  and  prestige. 

The  turbulent  events  of  the  French  Revolution  and  the  rise 
and  fall  of  Napoleon's  dominion  in  Europe,  which  had  exercised 


candidate  ran  against  Monroe,  who  received  all  but  one  of  the  electoral 
votes.  That  one  was  cast  for  John  Quincy  Adams,  for  the  purely  sentimental 
reason  that  the  elector  wished  to  see  reserved  for  George  Washington  alone  the 
tribute  of  a  unanimous  choice. 

2  Monroe  in  his  long  veto  message  argued  the  constitutional  point  with  great 
earnestness,  consistently  maintaining  the  position  that  an  amendment  to  the  Con- 
stitution would  remove  his  scruples.  That  the  Westerners  believed  their  interests 
thwarted  by  a  mistaken  political  philosophy  and  not  by  any  sectional  opposition 
from  the  South  is  shown  by  the  comments  of  the  Western  press.  "There  is  a 
party  of  politicians  at  Washington,"  said  an  Ohio  paper  in  July,  1823,  "whose 
consciences  are  so  tender  or  whose  minds  are  so  contracted  that  no  general  system 
of  internal  improvements  can  be  anticipated  from  the  councils  of  the  nation  until 
there  is  a  radical  change  in  the  Executive  Department." 


322  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

so  powerful  an  influence  over  the  domestic  and  foreign  policies 
of  the  new  American  republic  for  a  quarter  of  a  century,  had 
their  aftermath  in  diplomatic  negotiations  which  culminated  in 
the  Monroe  Doctrine  of  1823.  And  from  the  close  of  Monroe's 
second  term  to  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  no  major 
American  policies  were  dictated  by  the  action  of  the  European 
powers.  Conservative  reaction  to  repair  the  havoc  which 
Napoleon  had  made  among  the  thrones  of  Europe  was  inevitable 
after  the  overthrow  of  the  Corsican  adventurer.  On  its  senti- 
mental side  it  took  the  form  of  the  Holy  Alliance,  a  league  in 
which  the  rulers  of  Austria  and  Prussia  joined  the  romantic 
Czar  of  Russia  in  an  agreement  to  rule  their  peoples  as  pious 
despots,  "in  accord  with  the  principles  of  the  holy  Christian 
religion."  On  its  more  practical  side  it  took  the  form  of  a 
quadruple  alliance  between  the  above-mentioned  powers  and 
England  (France  being  admitted  a  little  later,  when  she  had 
given  due  signs  of  repentance  for  her  infatuation  with  Napo- 
leon), to  watch  over  Europe  and  prevent  the  tares  of  democ- 
racy, which  had  been  sowed  by  the  French  Revolution,  from 
springing  up  and  choking  the  pure  wheat  of  authority.  The 
program  of  the  Quadruple  Alliance  was  to  be  carried  out  in 
a  series  of  European  congresses  meeting  at  frequent  intervals 
to  uphold  the  principle  of  "legitimacy,"  which  Henry  Clay 
called  "a  soft  word  for  despotism."  So  long  as  the  Alliance 
confined  its  operations  to  Europe,  chastising  revolution  in 
Piedmont  or  Naples,  it  was  no  concern  of  the  United  States ; 
but  when  the  Congress  of  Verona  (1822),  in  addition  to  the 
plan  of  crossing  the  Pyrenees  to  quell  revolt  in  Spain,  mooted 
the  design  of  crossing  the  Atlantic  to  restore  to  King  Ferdinand 
Spain's  colonies  which  had  set  up  as  independent  republics  in 
the  New  World,  the  aspect  of  affairs  was  changed.  Great  Britain 
refused  to  be  a  party  to  the  schemes  of  the  Congress  of  Verona. 
She  had  developed  a  thriving  trade  with  the  South  American 
republics,  which  the  restoration  of  the  authority  of  Spain  would 
have  ruined.  Besides,  there  were  rumors  that  Mexico  was  to 
be  allotted  to  France  and  California  to  Russia  in  payment  for 
their  shares  in  the  overseas  enterprise. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  323 

Meanwhile  there  had  been  growing  in  the  United  States  a 
sentiment  in  favor  of  recognizing  the  independence  of  the  new 
Spanish- American  republics  and  even  of  forming  a  close  alliance 
with  them.  The  champion  of  this  Pan-American  policy  was 
Henry  Clay,  who  in  impassioned  speeches  in  the  House  urged 
the  sympathy  of  our  nation  for  -"eighteen  millions  of  people 
struggling  to  burst  their  chains."  "We  look  too  much  abroad," 
he  said;  "let  us  no  longer  watch  the  nod  of  any  European 
politician,  let  us  become  real  and  true  Americans  and  place 
ourselves  at  the  head  of  the  American  system."  So  long  as  our 
negotiations  with  Spain  over  the  Florida  treaty  were  pending 
(seepage  303)  we  cautiously  refrained  from  recognizing  the  new 
republics,  although  we  showed  our  sympathy  for  them  by  open- 
ing our  ports  to  them  and  maintaining  "agents"  in  Caracas, 
Buenos  Aires,  and  other  centers  of  the  revolt.  The  Florida 
treaty  was  finally  ratified  by  the  Spanish  Cortes  in  1821,  and 
in  the  spring  of  the  next  year  Monroe  signified  to  Congress 
his  readiness  to  recognize  the  republics,  asking  for  the  appro- 
priations necessary  to  maintain  diplomatfc  establishments  in 
them.  The  House  responded  with  but  a  single  dissenting  vote. 
On  June  17,  1822,  a  minister  from  Colombia  was  formally  re- 
ceived at  Washington,  and  within  the  next  few  months  United 
States  ministers  were  sent  to  the  most  important  of  the  Spanish- 
American  republics.  Colombia  and  Chile,  in  a  treaty  of  July, 
1822,  suggested  "the  construction  of  a  continental  system  for 
America"  as  a  makeweight  to  the  Quadruple  Alliance  in  Europe.1 

Another  important  event  occurred  about  the  same  time  to 
warn  the  American  government  of  the  danger  of  the  encroach- 
ment of  European  powers  on  the  Western  Hemisphere.  The 
Czar  of  Russia  issued  an  ukase  (decree)  in  the  early  autumn 
of  1821,  claiming  the  north  Pacific  coast  as  far  south  as  the 

1  Perhaps  they  were  taking  a  leaf  from  the  book  of  Henry  Clay,  who  had  made 
a  speech  in  the  summer  of  1821  exposing  the  sinister  designs  of  the  Holy  Alliance 
and  advocating  the  formation  of  a  counterbalancing  alliance  in  the  two  Ameri- 
cas, with  liberty  and  democracy  for  its  watchwords  in  the  place  of  legitimacy 
and  autocracy.  Still  earlier  (1820)  Clay  had  announced  the  grandiose  plan  of  es- 
tablishing "a  human-freedom  league  in  America,  including  all  the  nations  from 
Hudson's  Bay  to  Cape  Horn." 


324  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

fiftieth  parallel  and  warning  the  vessels  of  all  other  nations  not 
to  approach  within  one  hundred  miles  of  that  coast.  Secretary 
Adams  met  the  decree  with  a  powerful  protest.  He  told  the 
Russian  minister,  Baron  Tuyl,  that  we  "should  contest  the 
right  of  Russia  to  any  territorial  establishment  on  this  conti- 
nent, and  should  assume  distinctly  the  principle  that  the  Amer- 
ican continents  are  no  longer  subjects  for  any  new  European 
colonial  establishments."  When,  therefore,  the  British  foreign 
minister,  George  Canning,  suggested  to  Richard  Rush,  our 
minister  at  the  court  of  St.  James,  the  desirability  of  united 
action  on  the  part  of  the  two  countries  in  preventing  the  Alliance 
from  extending  its  activities  to  the  American  continents,  he 
spoke  to  receptive  ears.1  Rush  referred  the  matter  to  Wash- 
ington, and  Monroe,  as  was  his  custom,  conferred  with  the 
ex-presidents  Jefferson  and  Madison.  Both  of  them  were  in 
favor  of  accepting  Canning's  proposal.  Jefferson's  reply,  dated 
October  24,  1823,  is  especially  noteworthy  as  containing  the 
gist  of  the  doctrine  announced  six  months  later  by  the  Presi- 
dent: "The  question  presented  by  the  letters  you  have  sent 
me  is  the  most  momentous  which  has  been  presented  to  my 
contemplation  since  that  of  independence.  That  made  us  a 
nation,  this  sets  our  compass  and  points  the  course  which  we 
are  to  steer  through  the  ocean  of  time  opening  upon  us.  ... 
Our  first  and  fundamental  maxim  should  be  never  to  entangle 
ourselves  in  the  broils  of  Europe.  Our  second  never  to  suffer 
Europe  to  meddle  in  cis-Atlantic  affairs.  America,  north  and 
south,  has  a  set  of  interests  distinct  from  those  of  Europe  and 
peculiarly  her  own.  She  should  therefore  have  a  system  of  her 
own  apart  from  those  of  Europe." 

1As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  first  suggestion  of  common  action  between  the 
United  States  and  Great  Britain  for  the  protection  of  the  Latin-American  re- 
publics had  come  from  this  side  of  the  water.  John  Quincy  Adams  records  in 
his  "Diary,"  under  the  date  of  July  25,  1818,  "Two  days  ago  Monroe  had  very 
abruptly  asked  me  to  see  Mr.  Bagot  [the  British  minister  at  Washington]  and 
propose  through  him  to  the  British  government  an  immediate  cooperation 
between  the  United  States  and  Great  Britain  to  promote  the  independence  of 
South  America."  But  on  the  English  side  Lord  Castlereagh  was  not  willing,  and 
on  our  side  the  Florida  negotiations  stood  in  the  way. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  325 

John  Quincy  Adams  was  no  less  eager  than  Jefferson  or 
Madison  to  thwart  the  designs  of  the  Alliance  in  the  Western 
Hemisphere,  but  he  believed  that  we  should  "make  it  an  Amer- 
ican cause  alone,"  especially  as  we  were  the  only  nation  that  had 
recognized  the  independence  of  the  South  American  republics. 
"It  would  be  more  candid  as  well  as  more  dignified,"  he  said  in 
cabinet  meeting,  "to  avow  our  principles  explicitly  to  Russia 
and  France  than  to  come  in  as  a  cock-boat  in  the  wake  of  a 
British  man-of-war."  The  view  of  the  Secretary  of  State  pre- 
vailed with  Monroe  over  the  advice  of  his  two  older  councilors, 
and  the  annual  message  which  the  President  sent  to  Congress 
on  December  2,  1823,  contained  that  announcement  of  our 
policy  in  regard  to  the  relations  of  European  powers  to  the 
Western  Hemisphere  which  has  ever  since  been  known  as  the 
Monroe  Doctrine. 

There  are  three  main  principles  set  down  in  the  Monroe 
Doctrine — two  specific  and  one  general.  The  first,  aimed  es- 
pecially at  Russia's  threat  of  encroachment  on  the  Pacific  coast, 
declared  that  "the  American  continents,  by  the  free  and  inde- 
pendent condition  which  they  have  assumed  and  maintained, 
are  henceforth  not  to  be  considered  as  subjects  for  future  colo- 
nisation by  any  European  powers."  The  second  was  a  warning 
to  the  Quadruple  Alliance  not  to  interfere  to  reduce  the  new 
Spanish-American  republics  to  their  old  allegiance,  nor  to  at- 
tempt to  establish  on  this  continent  the  autocratic  principles  of 
divine-right  monarchy:  "We  owe  it  therefore  to  candor,  and  to 
the  amicable  relations  existing  between  the  United  States  and 
those  powers,  to  declare  that  we  should  consider  any  attempt  on 
their  part  to  extend  their  system  to  any  portion  of  this  hemi- 
sphere as  dangerous  to  our  peace  and  safety.  With  the  existing 
colonies  of  any  European  power  we  have  not  interfered  and  shall 
not  interfere.  But  with  the  governments  who  have  declared  their 
independence,  and  maintained  it,  and  whose  independence  we 
have,  on  great  considerations  and  on  just  principles,  acknowl- 
edged, we  could  not  view  any  interposition  for  the  sake  of 
oppressing  them,  or  controlling  in  any  other  manner  their  des- 
tiny by  any  European  power,  in  any  other  light  than  as  the 


326  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

manifestation  of  an  unfriendly  disposition  towards  the  United 
States."  The  third  principle  was  the  general  proposition  of  the 
"two  spheres"  of  influence — the  United  States  disclaiming  any 
desire  to  interfere  with  the  internal  affairs  of  Europe,  and  at  the 
same  time  denying  the  right  of  Europe  to  interfere  with  affairs 
in  America:  "In  the  wars  of  the  European  powers  in  matters 
relating  to  themselves  we  have  never  taken  any  part,  nor  does 
it  comport  with  our  policy  to  do  so.  It  is  only  when  our  rights 
are  invaded  or  seriously  menaced  that  we  resent  injuries  or 
make  preparations  for  our  defence.  .  .  .  Our  policy  in  regard 
to  Europe  is  not  to  interfere  with  internal  concerns  of  any  of 
its  powers,  to  consider  the  government  de  facto  as  the  legitimate 
government  for  us,  to  cultivate  friendly  relations  with  it,  ... 
meeting  in  all  instances  the  just  claims  of  every  power,  submit- 
ting to  injuries  from  none.  But  in  regard  to  these  continents 
circumstances  are  eminently  and  conspicuously  different.  It  is 
impossible  that  the  allied  powers  should  extend  their  political 
system  to  any  portion  of  either  continent  without  endangering 
our  peace  and  happiness." 

This  general  principle,  on  which  the  specific  warnings  of  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  were  based,  did  not  originate  with  Monroe  or 
Adams  or  Canning.  It  is  as  old  as  our  national  government 
itself.  It  appears  in  Washington's  Neutrality  Proclamation  of 
1793  and  in  his  Farewell  Address  of  1796.  It  was  constantly 
reiterated  by  his  successors,  especially  by  Jefferson.  Canning 
told  Rush  in  a  conversation  in  1823  that  he  had  been  reading 
Jefferson's  letters  as  Secretary  of  State  (1793)  and  that  he 
found  them  "admirable,"  forming  a  "complete  neutral  code." 
As  for  the  specific  announcement  of  December,  1823,  it  lias 
been  claimed  that  Adams's  name,  or  even  Canning's,  would  be 
more  appropriately  linked  with  it  than  Monroe's.  Canning 
virtually  claimed  the  credit  for  safeguarding  the  independence 
of  the  new  republics  when  he  made  his  famous  boast  in  Par- 
liament in  1826,  "I  called  the  New  World  into  existence  to 
redress  the  balance  of  the  Old."  But  as  we  have  seen,  Monroe 
had  sought  to  approach  the  British  minister  in  Washington  on 
the  subject  as  early  as  1818.  Furthermore,  Canning  was  not 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  327 

at  all  pleased  with  the  form  which  the  Monroe  Doctrine  actually 
took,  and  spoke  sneeringly  of  "the  President's  influential  mes-. 
sage.'7  He  was  a  vain  man,  a  Tory  with  little  sympathy  for 
republican  institutions,  and  he  maintained  throughout  his  ten- 
ure of  power  the  tone  of  urbane  hostility  to  the  United  States 
which  he  had  shown  in  the  days  of  his  negotiations  with  Jeffer- 
son's government  on  impressments  and  our  maritime  rights. 
He  refused  to  acknowledge  the  independence  of  the  Spanish- 
American  republics  and  was  interested  only  in  getting  us  to 
support  England  in  the  preservation  of  the  open  door  for  their 
commerce.  When  he  was  assured  by  the  French  minister  at 
London  that  there  was  really  no  danger  of  intervention  to 
restore  the  rule  of  Spain  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic,  his  ardor 
for  a  proclamation  for  the  protection  of  the  republics  cooled. 
Adams,  of  course,  contributed  very  largely  to  the  promulgation 
of  the  Monroe  Doctrine  and  probably  furnished  much  of  the 
actual  text  of  the  document.  But  Adams  never  suggested  that 
the  credit  for  the  message  belonged  to  him,  and  in  his  own 
presidency  he  referred  to  it  as  "the  doctrine  announced  by 
my  predecessor  to  the  world." 

The  Monroe  Doctrine  was  resented  and  ridiculed  in  the  press 
of  Europe;  but  it  was  received  "with  one  general  glow  of 
enthusiasm  in  the  United  States,"  as  Daniel  Webster  said,  and 
it  has  ever  since  been  the  most  popular  slogan  in  American 
history.1  In  1895,  when  we  were  in  the  midst  of  a  controversy 
with  Great  Britain  over  the  boundary  line  between  Venezuela 
and  British  Guiana,  Secretary  Olney  asserte.d  that  the  Monroe 
Doctrine  was  "the  accepted  public  law  of  this  country."  But 
to  call  it  "public  law"  was  rather  bold.  It  was  nothing  more 
than  an  announcement  of  policy  in  a  presidential  message. 
The  European  nations  never  accepted  its  validity  as  a  tenet 
of  international  law,  although  they  generally  respected  it  in 
practice.  Henry  Clay  introduced  a  joint  resolution  into  Con- 
gress in  1824  sanctioning  the  doctrine,  but  the  legislative  de- 

1The  immediate  result  was  a  treaty  with  Russia,  concluded  in  1824,  by  which 
that  power  agreed  to  limit  her  claims  to  the  southward  on  the  Pacific  coast  by 
the  parallel  54°  40'  north  latitude. 


328  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

partment  of  our  government  was  content  to  let  the  matter  rest 
as  an  executive  pronouncement.  Nor  have  our  courts  based 
their  decisions  upon  the  doctrine  as  "public  law." 

Captain  Mahan  declared  that  the  Monroe  Doctrine  possesses 
"the  inherent  principle  of  life,  which  adapts  itself  with  the 
flexibility  of  a  growing  plant  to  the  successive  conditions  it 
encounters."  It  is  true  that  the  doctrine  has  been  invoked 
again  and  again  as  our  warrant  to  dictate  as  to  the  ownership 
of  "the  existing  European  colonies"  in  the  Western  Hemi- 
sphere, to  assert  our  authority  in  the  settlement  of  controversies 
over  boundaries  or  debts  between  European  powers  and  the 
Spanish-American  republics,  and  even  to  interfere  in  the  in- 
ternal affairs  of  those  republics  themselves.  The  stretching  of 
the  Monroe  Doctrine  by  "interpretation"  was  begun  as  early  as 
the  summer  of  1825,  when  Clay  warned  France  that  we  should 
not  allow  Cuba  or  Porto  Rico  to  be  transferred  from  Spain 
to  any  other  European  power.  But  there  is  nothing  in  the 
language  of  the  doctrine  to  warrant  these  later  widenings  of 
its  scope.  There  is  no  word  of  an  hegemony  of  the  United 
States  over  the  countries  to  the  south  or  of  our  right  to  arbi- 
trate their  disputes.  There  is  no  hint  of  a  financial  protector- 
ate, such  as  we  have  exercised  in  Santo  Domingo,  Haiti,  and 
Nicaragua.  All  these  powers  have  been  derived  from  the  doc- 
trine by  "implication."  The  purpose  of  the  doctrine  as  it  existed 
in  Monroe's  mind  was  fulfilled  when  the  danger  of  Russian 
aggression  on  the  Pacific  coast  and  of  European  intervention 
in  South  America  was  over.  It  was  purely  defensive  and  pre- 
cautionary. It  has  been  made  aggressive  and  comprehensive. 
That  part  of  the  doctrine  which  announced  our  guardianship 
of  the  independence  and  inviolability  of  the  Latin-American 
republics  has  tended  more  and  more  toward  a  pan-American 
union.  That  part  which  declared  our  policy  of  abstention  from 
the  "wars  agitating  Europe"  was  broken  in  spirit  when  we 
embarked  on  colonial  adventures  in  the  Far  East  and  joined 
the  powers  in  the  preservation  of  the  integrity  of  the  Chinese 
Empire,  and  in  letter  when  we  sent  American  troops  to  the 
battlefields  in  Flanders  and  France  in  the  great  World  War. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  329 

SECTIONAL  RIVALRY 

As  Monroe's  highly  successful  administration  drew  to  a  close 
the  country  was  at  the  flood  tide  of  prosperity.  The  forty  years 
which  had  elapsed  since  the  close  of  the  American  Revolution 
had  seen  our  population  grow  from  less  than  4,000,000  to  over 
10,000,000,  and  our  area  more  than  doubled  by  the  acquisitions 
from  France  and  Spain.  An  agreement  had  been  made  with 
Great  Britain  in  1818  for  the  joint  occupation  of  the  Oregon 
territory  beyond  the  Rockies.  The  new  national  defenses  and 
naval  enlargement  projected  after  the  War  of  1812  had  pro- 
gressed satisfactorily.  Our  debt,  which  stood  at  $123,000,000 
at  Monroe's  inauguration,  was  reduced  to  $79,000,000  when  he 
left  office.  The  financial  panic  of  1819  was  weathered,  and  the 
National  Bank,  surviving  its  brief  period  of  mismanagement, 
was  entering  on  a  career  of  prosperity  under  its  able  president, 
Langdon  Cheves.  The  American  ship  Savannah  crossed  the 
ocean  under  sail  and  steam  in  the  summer  of  1819,  and  within 
a  few  years  steam  "packets"  were  plying  regularly  between 
New  York  and  Liverpool.  On  our  inland  waters  and  along  the 
coast  from  Boston  to  New  Orleans  steam  navigation  was  in- 
creasing rapidly.  The  great  Erie  Canal,  destined  to  open  an 
ice-free  waterway  from  the  Lakes  to  the  Atlantic  and  to  make 
New  York  the  metropolis  of  the  Western  World,  was  begun 
the  year  Monroe  entered  office,  being  completed  with  fitting 
ceremonies  the  year  he  retired.  / 

The  sectional  bitterness  caused  by  the  War  of  1812  seemed*/ 
to  have  died  away.  Massachusetts  returned  to  the  Republican 
fold  with  the  election  of  Governor  Eustis  in  1823,  while  the 
legislature  of  the  state  struck  from  its  records  the  unpatriotic 
resolutions  of  a  decade  before  to  the  effect  that  it  was  " un- 
becoming a  moral  and  religious  people"  to  rejoice  over  the 
naval  victories  of  Hull,  Bainbridge,  and  Decatur.  Although 
the  tone  of  the  debates  on  the  Missouri  question  had  been  omi- 
nous, all  danger  of  civil  strife  seemed  to  be  removed  by  the 
Compromise.  The  balance  between  the  free  and  the  slave  states 
was  preserved  and  the  status  of  slavery  "forever"  fixed  in  the 


330  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

new  Western  territory  by  the  36°  30'  line.  Finally,  in  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  we  had  assumed  the  role  of  arbiter  of  impor- 
tant matters  in  the  western  continent  and  had  spoken  to  Europe 
in  a  tone  of  firm  consciousness  of  our  place  among  the  "powers" 
of  the  world.  Few  presidents  in  our  history  have  been  able  to 
look  back  upon  their  administration  with  more  unalloyed  satis- 
faction than  the  patient,  sagacious,  conciliatory  James  Monroe 
— an  administration  which  the  old  Federalist  John  Adams  pro- 
nounced " without  a  fault,"  and  the  Federalist  Judge  Marshall 
declared  "was  not  darkened  by  a  single  cloud." 

Nevertheless,  the  historical  student,  from  the  vantage  ground 
of  a  wider  perspective,  sees  already  germinating  in  Monroe's 
second  administration  the  seeds  of  a  bitter  sectional  rivalry 
which  was  to  make  the  administration  of  his  successor  a  con- 
stant trial  and  to  result  in  a  new  alignment  of  parties  which  was 
to  last  through  a  generation  to  the  great  crisis  of  the  Civil  War. 
Every  feature  of  that  revival  of  national  spirit  which  we  have 
studied  in  the  present  chapter — the  restoration  of  the  National 
Bank,  the  high  tariff,  the  increase  of  our  defenses  on  sea  and 
land,  the  expenditure  of  national  funds  for  internal  improve- 
ments, the  unlimited  offer  of  public  lands  at  cheap  prices,  the 
growing  prestige  and  authority  of  the  Supreme  Court,  and  even 
the  bold  and  popular  policy  announced  in  the  Monroe  Doc- 
trine— became  a  subject  of  violent  controversy,  in  which  the 
divergent  interests  of  the  various  sections  of  our  country 
clashed. 

The  first  test  of  the  strength  of  the  rival  sections  came  in 
the  presidential  election  of  1824,  although  the  sectional  charac- 
ter of  the  rivalry  was  not  yet  explicit  or  avowed.  The  "dynasty 
of  Virginia  secretaries"  came  to  an  end  with  Monroe.  But  long 
before  the  expiration  of  his  term  of  office  different  parts  of  the 
country  were  recommending  their  "favorite  sons"  for  the  suc- 
cession. The  legislature  of  South  Carolina  designated  William 
Lowndes  as  early  as  1821.  The  next  year  Tennessee  put  for- 
ward Andrew  Jackson  and  Kentucky  named  Henry  Clay.  In 
January,  1823,  a  mixed  convention  of  Republican  members  of 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  331 

the  legislature  and  delegates  of  the  towns  of  Massachusetts 
nominated  John  Quincy  Adams.  The  time-honored  method  of 
selecting  a  candidate  by  a  congressional  caucus  was  falling  into 
disrepute  because  of  its  undemocratic  nature.  Still,  a  caucus 
met  in  February,  1824,  and  named  the  Secretary  of  the  Treas- 
ury, William  H.  Crawford,  who  had  been  manipulating  the 
political  wires  and  using  his  official  patronage  for  some  years  to 
accomplish  this  desired  result.  But  the  fact  that  only  68  of  the 
261  members  of  Congress  attended  the  caucus  was  a  sufficient 
indication  of  the  measure  of  strength  which  this  method  of 
nomination  would  give  to  Crawford's  candidacy. 

All  of  these  aspirants  for  the  presidency  belonged  to  the  Re- 
publican party — for  there  was  no  other  party  to  belong  to. 
Each  of  them,  wishing  to  appear  as  a  truly  national  figure  with 
a  program  to  win  votes  in  all  parts  of  the  Union,  minimized  or 
disguised  in  ambiguous  language  the  interests  of  the  particular 
section  which  he  represented.  Besides,  those  interests,  as  we 
have  already  seen,  were  not  sharply  enough  defined  in  1824 
to  unite  compact  political  parties  in  their  support.  The  tariff 
bill  passed  in  the  spring  of  that  presidential  year  is  an  illus- 
tration. It  was  championed  by  Clay,  praised  by  Adams,  and 
accepted  by  Jackson — only  Crawford  refusing  to  commit  him- 
self. The  consistent  policy  of  the  support  of  high  tariffs  by  the 
North  and  their  antagonism  by  the  South,  which  appears  in  all 
subsequent  tariff  legislation,  was  not  developed  in  1824.  Such 
fight  as  there  was  over  the  bill  was  on  the  question  of  the 
distribution  of  the  benefits  of  protection.  Kentucky,  Missouri, 
and  Pennsylvania  supported  the  measure  for  its  duties  on  hemp, 
lead,  and  iron ;  the  industrial  interests  of  the  North,  for  its  pro- 
tection to  the  cotton  and  woolen  manufactures;  while  the 
mercantile  interests  of  New  England  and  New  York  made  com- 
mon cause  with  the  South  in  opposing  a  bill  which  increased 
the  cost  of  materials  for  building  ships,  cultivating  plantations, 
and  clothing  slaves.  The  narrow  margin  by  which  the  bill  was 
finally  passed  after  a  debate  of  two  and  a  half  months  (105  to 
102  in  the  House,  25  to  22  in  the  Senate)  gave  little  encour- 


332  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

agement  to  Clay's  optimistic  theory  that  harmony  could  be 
preserved  by  a  judicious  distribution  of  sectional  favor.1 

In  the  absence  of  any  clearly  defined  political  issues,  the 
campaign  of  1824  took  on  an  intensely  personal  aspect,  the 
more  so  as  all  the  aspirants  for  the  presidency  were  together  in 
Washington*  during  the  previous  winter — Adams,  Calhoun,  and 
Crawford  in  Monroe's  cabinet,  Jackson  in  the  Senate,  and  Clay 
in  the  House.  Adams's  voluminous  " Diary"  reveals  the  extraor- 
dinary amount  of  electioneering  that  went  on.  The  vote  in 
November  resulted  in  the  choice  of  99  electors  for  Jackson,  84 
for  Adams,  41  for  Crawford,  and  37  for  Clay.  Calhoun,  seeing 
the  drift  of  his  own  state  of  South  Carolina  toward  Jackson, 
had  wisely  accepted  the  advice  of  a  Pennsylvania  convention  to 
run  for  the  vice  presidency.  He  received  182  of  the  261  votes 
cast.  As  no  candidate  for  the  presidency  had  received  a  ma- 
jority, the  names  of  the  three  highest  on  the  list  went  to  the 
House  for  a  decision,  the  group  of  Representatives  from  each 
state  casting  a  single  vote.  Henry  Clay,  though  out  of  the  race 
himself,  obviously  had  it  in  his  power  to  turn  the  scales  in  favor 
of  either  Adams  or  Jackson.  His  influence  as  Speaker  of  the 
House  was  great,  and  the  Republicans  of  those  states  which 
had  given  him  their  electoral  votes  (Kentucky,  Ohio,  and 
Missouri)  would  naturally  support  the  candidate  whom  he 
favored.  The  genial  Speaker,  therefore,  was  courted  by  each 
of  the  factions  and  assured  by  each  of  the  great  respect  in 
which  his  talents  were  held  by  their  respective  candidates.  Clay 
had  not  been  friendly  to  Adams  during  tiie  Monroe  adminis- 
tration. He  had  himself  coveted  the  high  appointment  which 
Adams  received.  The  two  men  were,  moreover,  uncongenial  in 
their  tastes  and  habits.  Yet  they  were  brought  together  and  had 
a  long  interview  (the  details  of  which  Adams  discreetly  omits 
from  his  "Diary")  a  few  weeks  before  the  balloting  began 

1MIt  has  appeared  to  me  in  the  administration  of  the  general  government  to 
be  a  just  principle  to  inquire  what  interests  belong  to  each  section  of  our  coun- 
try, and  to  promote  those  interests  as  far  as  practical,  consistently  with  the  Con- 
stitution, having  always  an  eye  to  the  welfare  of  the  whole"  (to  Francis  Brooke, 
August  28,  1823). 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  333 

in  the  House.  Immediately  after  the  interview  Clay  announced 
that  he  should  support  Adams.  On  the  first  ballot  cast  by  the 
House  Adams  was  elected  by  the  votes  of  thirteen  states.  Jack- 
son carried  seven  and  Crawford  four.  Two  days  later  Adams 
offered  Clay  the  first  place  in  his  cabinet. 

This  series  of  events  gave  rise  to  the  charge  of  a  "  corrupt 
bargain"  between  Adams  and  Clay  to  defeat  the  will  of  the 
people  of  the  United  States  to  seat  Andrew  Jackson  in  the  presi- 
dential chair.  A  Republican  from  Pennsylvania,  named  Kremer, 
published  a  card  in  a  Philadelphia  paper,  alleging  that  Adams 
had  offered  Clay  the  post  of  Secretary  of  State  in  return  for  his 
votes  in  the  House,  and  that  Clay  would  have  been  willing  to 
secure  Jackson's  election  if  the  latter's  agents  had  been  ready 
to  meet  the  bid.  "None  of  Jackson's  friends  would  descend  to 
such  mean  barter  and  sale,"  declared  Kremer.  Clay  indignantly 
repelled  the  charge  in  a  public  communication  and  demanded 
an  investigation  by  the  House,  which  Kremer  sneaked  out  of. 
Nevertheless,  when  Clay  received  and  accepted  the  appoint- 
ment, Jackson  believed  that  the  charge  was  true,  and  pilloried 
Clay  as  "the  Judas  of  the  West,"  who  had  made  his  unholy 
bargain  for  thirty  pieces  of  silver.  The  Jackson  forces  every- 
where took  up  the  cry.  Impetuous  John  Randolph  poured  out 
his  scorn  for  this  alliance  of  "the  Puritan  and  the  Black-leg," 
and  answered  for  his  epithets  by  a  duel  with  Clay,  in  which 
neither  was  hurt. 

Adams  has  been  called  "injudicious"  by  some  historians  for 
appointing  Clay  in  defiance  of  the  widespread  suspicion  of  a 
"deal"  between  them.  But  both  men  are  above  any  suspicion 
of  dishonorable  action.  Clay  had  every  good  reason  to  give 
his  support  to  Adams.  On  the  questions  of  national  policy 
which  Clay  had  most  at  heart,  like  the  protective  tariff  and 
internal  improvements,  Adams  was  far  more  sympathetic  than 
either  of  the  other  two  candidates.  Crawford,  besides  his  per- 
sonal unfitness  for  the  office,  due  to  a  stroke  of  paralysis  suf- 
fered in  the  autumn  of  1823,  was  already  committed  to 
the  thoroughgoing  states'-rights  view  of  the  older  men  of  the 
South.  And  Jackson  was  not  only  Clay's  bitter  rival  for  the 


334  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

leadership  of  the  West  but  was  in  Clay's  opinion  utterly  unfit 
for  the  presidency,  being  a  mere  "military  chieftain"  whose 
claim  to  political  honors  rested  on  the  victory  of  New  Orleans 
and  the  chastisement  of  Indians  and  half-breeds  in  Florida. 
If  Clay  also  believed  that  his  own  political  fortunes  would  be 
best  served  by  alliance  with  a  candidate  who  had  carried  New 
England  and  New  York,  he  was  entertaining  a  notion  which 
it  would  be  mere  hypocrisy  to  condemn  in  our  American 
politics.  As  for  the  upright  Adams,  there  is  no  evidence  that  he 
consulted  any  other  consideration  than  the  public  good  in  ap- 
pointing Clay,  nor  has  it  ever  been  a  cause  of  reproach  to 
our  presidents,  down  to  Woodrow  Wilson,  that  they  have  given 
the  first  place  in  their  cabinets  to  disappointed  rivals  or  to  men 
who  have  made  their  own  election  sure. 

John  Quincy  Adams,  by  his  natural  gifts,  his  training,  his 
wide  experience  in  public  affairs,1  by  the  justness  of  his  views 
and  the  spotless  integrity  of  his  character,  was  one  of  the  best- 
qualified  men  ever  elected  to  the  presidency.  But  he  was  chosen 
at  an  evil  moment  for  his  own  peace  of  soul.  His  entire  admin- 
istration was  vexed  with  factional  quarrels  and  sectional  jeal- 
ousies, while  he  himself  tried  to  pursue  a  course  of  broad  and 
impartial  nationalism.2  He  alone  refused  to  recognize  the  ri- 
valry of  interests  between  North  and  South,  East  and  West, 
that  were  rapidly  developing  throughout  his  term,  and  he  paid 
for  his  persistent  nationalism  by  a  splendid  isolation.  From 
the  very  outset  he  had  to  meet  dogged  opposition.  Fifteen  of 
the  forty-one  senators  voted  against  the  confirmation  of  Clay. 
Although  the  electors  of  all  the  states  (except  Connecticut) 

*At  the  age  of  eleven  he  had  accompanied  his  father  on  a  diplomatic  mission 
to  France  (1778),  and  had  subsequently  served  as  secretary,  minister,  or  special 
envoy  at  the  courts  of  Russia,  Prussia,  the  Netherlands,  Sweden,  France,  and 
England.  He  had  been  a  United  States  senator  from  Massachusetts  for  ten  years 
when  Monroe  appointed  him  Secretary  of  State  in  1817 — an  office  which  he  filled 
with  conspicuous  success  during  both  of  Monroe's  terms. 

2 He  even  wished  to  keep  Monroe's  cabinet  intact,  only  filling  the  vacancies 
caused  by  his  own  and  Calhoun's  elevation.  He  asked  Crawford  to  continue  in 
the  Treasury  and  wanted  Jackson  to  serve  as  Secretary  of  War.  But  neither  of 
these  rivals  would  enter  the  cabinet,  and  Adams  filled  the  vacant  places  with 
Richard  Rush  of  Pennsylvania  and  James  Barbour  of  Virginia. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  335 

that  had  voted  for  Adams  had  also  voted  for  Calhoun  as  vice 
president,  the  latter  declared  his  opposition  to  the  administra- 
tion as  soon  as  Clay  was  appointed  to  the  cabinet.  He  used 
his  position  as  President  of  the  Senate  to  appoint  committees 
hostile  to  Adams  and  allowed  John  Randolph  to  abuse  the  Presi- 
dent to  his  heart's  content  on  the  floor  of  the  Senate.  Van 
Buren,  a  senator  from  New  York  and  a  boss  of  the  famous 
"  Albany  Regency,"  who  had  resorted  to  trickery  in  the  attempt 
to  get  the  legislature  of  his  state  to  cast  its  electoral  vote  for 
Crawford,  made  opposition  to  every  measure  of  the  Adams  ad- 
ministration a  matter  of  principle,  quite  irrespective  of  the 
merits  of  the  questions.  On  one  occasion,  when  the  President's 
supporters  won  a  victory  in  the  Senate,  he  remarked,  "They 
have  beaten  us  by  a  few  votes,  .  .  .  but  if  they  had  only  taken 
the  other  side  we  should  have  had  them."  And  all  the  time 
Andrew  Jackson's  tireless  lieutenants  were  harping  on  the 
theme  of  the  "corrupt  bargain"  and  rousing  the  "plain  people" 
to  redress  the  wrong  by  which  an  intriguing  and  aristocratic 
House  of  Representatives  had  been  able  to  thwart  their  will.1 
The  Republican  party  divided  then  into  the  Adams-Clay 
wing  and  the  Jackson-Calhoun-Crawford  wing.  The  former 
came  to  be  known  as  National  Republicans,  because  of  their 
adhesion  to  the  nationalistic  program  of  the  decade  following 
the  War  of  1812.  The  latter  returned  to  the  old  states'-rights 
doctrine  of  the  Jeffersonian  school,  denouncing  the  intimate 
connection  of  the  money  power  with  national  politics,  opposing 
the  tariff  as  detrimental  to  the  staple  industry  of  the  South,  and 
realizing  ever  more  clearly  the  danger  to  the  slavery  interests 

1  Jackson  was  the  choice  of  the  people,  his  supporters  said,  and  therefore 
entitled  to  the  presidency.  But  the  claim  has  no  foundation.  Our  presidents  are 
not  elected  by  popular  vote,  nor  is  there  any  proof  that  the  vote  of  the  coun- 
try at  large  in  1824  would  have  been  cast  for  Jackson.  Legislatures  -chose  the 
electors  in  one  fourth  of  the  states,  and  in  those  states  where  the  people  chose 
them  the  majority  of  the  votes  were  not  cast  for  Jackson.  Nor  did  Jackson 
himself  seem  to  think  that  any  injustice  had  been  done  to  him  in  the  method  of 
the  election.  He  congratulated  Adams  on  the  evening  of  his  choice  by  the  House. 
But  when  Clay  was  appointed  and  confirmed,  Jackson  resigned  from  the  Senate 
and  began  the  four  years'  campaign  which  was  to  carry  him  triumphantly  into 
the  White  House. 


336  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  the  extension  of  the  power  of  the  national  government  over 
the  territories.  They  claimed  to  be  the  genuine  Democratic 
Republicans,  and  resuscitated  the  party  name  of  "Democrat," 
which  had  been  dropped  a  generation  before,  when  the  excesses 
of  the  French  Revolution  had  brought  it  into  disrepute. 

The  new  party  lines  were  not  drawn  with  the  distinctness 
which  had  separated  the  old  Federalists  and  Republicans  in 
Washington's  administration.  Our  country  was  much  larger 
and  its  interests  were  much  more  varied  and  complicated. 
The  West,  for  example,  which  formed  but  3  per  cent  of  the 
population  in  1790,  counted  32  per  cent  in  1820,  and  by  the 
census  of  the  latter  year  was  entitled  to  47  of  the  213  seats  in 
the  House.  Nine  of  the  twenty- four  states  in  the  Union  at  the 
beginning  of  John  Quincy  Adams's  administration  lay  west  of 
the  Alleghenies,  giving  them  three  eighths  of  the  seats  in  the 
Senate.  The  material  interests  of  the  West  seemed  on  the  whole 
to  lie  with  the  Adams-Clay  school,  which  favored  internal  im- 
provements at  national  expense  and  a  tariff  for  their  wool, 
hemp,  iron,  and  lead;  but  the  intense  democracy  of  the  new 
Western  commonwealths1  and  growing  pride  in  their  self- 
sufficiency  inclined  them  to  the  Jackson-Calhoun  side.  In  the 
election  of  1824  they  had  shown  this  conflict  of  sentiment. 
Indiana,  Alabama,  Mississippi,  and  Tennessee  voted  for  Jack- 
son; Kentucky,  Missouri,  and  Ohio  for  Clay;  while  Illinois 
and  Louisiana  divided  their  votes  between  Jackson  and  Adams. 
Finally,  as  events  were  soon  to  show,  there  was  no  real  identity 
of  interests  between  Jackson  and  Calhoun.  They  only  made 
common  cause  for  the  moment  against  Adams  and  Clay. 

Adams  realized  the  embarrassing  position  in  which  he  was 
placed.  Addressing  his  first  Congress  (in  which  the  adminis- 
tration candidate  for  Speaker  of  the  House  was  elected  by  a 
margin  of  only  five  votes),  he  said,  "Less  possessed  of  your 
confidence  in  advance  than  any  of  my  predecessors,  I  am  deeply 

1Ohio  was  the  only  state  of  the  Northwest,  and  Louisiana  and  Mississippi 
were  the  only  Western  states  south  of  the  Ohio,  that  had  not  adopted  manhood 
suffrage.  In  these  states  either  the  payment  of  taxes  or  the  purchase  of  public 
lands  or  enrollment  in  the  militia  conferred  the  vote. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  337 

conscious  of  the  prospect  that  I  shall  stand  more  and  oftener 
in  need  of  your  indulgence."  But  if  Adams  craved  the  indul- 
gence of  his  congressmen,  he  had  no  intention  of  indulging  their 
cravings.  Office-seekers  went  away  hungry  from  his  door.  He 
steadfastly  refused  to  use  the  enormous  power  of  the  presi- 
dential patronage  to  build  up  a  party  machine.  He  declined 
to  deprive  men  of  office  because  they  worked  for  Jackson  or 
Crawford.  A  despairing  editor-politician,  after  laboring  in 
vain  with  the  President  to  get  him  to  dismiss  a  political  enemy, 
left  with  the  Parthian  shot  that  Mr.  Adams  would  find  himself 
"dismissed"  at  the  next  election.  Adams  was  unwilling  or  un- 
able, also,  to  temper  his  policy  so  as  to  win  waverers  to  his  side. 
In  his  first  message  to  Congress  he  went  to  such  extremes  in 
the  advocacy  of  internal  improvements  that  even  Henry  Clay 
was  somewhat  taken  aback.  Many  of  the  President's  friends 
were  alienated,  and  his  enemies  made  the  message  an  occasion 
for  the  charge  that  he  was  aiming  to  revive  the  old  Federalist 
party  and  principles.1  Thomas  Jefferson,  now  in  his  eighty- 
third  year,  wrote  to  Madison  from  Monticello,  in  his  alarm  for 
the  preservation  of  the  rights  of  the  states,  suggesting  that  a 
public  protest  based  on  the  Virginia  and  Kentucky  Resolutions 
of  1798  should  be  issued.  Adams  failed  to  win  support  for  his 
national  policy  and  was  obliged  to  confine  his  recommendations 
to  the  modest  limits  prescribed  in  the  bill  of  April,  1824 — ap- 
propriations for  the  surveys  and  plans  of  roads  projected  as 
national  highways,  for  the  repair  of  existing  roads,  and  for  the 
purchase  of  stock  in  private  companies  (controlled  by  state 
laws)  for  the  construction  of  canals.  Any  national  work  on  the 
scale  of  the  great  Erie  Canal,  which  was  opened  with  imposing 
festivities  only  a  few  weeks  before  he  sent  his  first  message  to 

1  Thomas  H.  Benton  says,  in  his  "Thirty  Years'  View":  "The  declaration  of 
principles  which  would  give  so  much  power  to  the  government,  and  the  danger 
of  which  had  just  been  so  fully  set  forth  by  Mr.  Monroe  in  his  veto  of  the 
Cumberland  Road  bill,  alarmed  the  old  Republicans  and  gave  new  grounds  of 
opposition  to  President  Adams'  administration  in  addition  to  the  strong  one 
growing  out  of  the  election  in  the  House  of  Representatives."  Crawford  wrote 
to  Henry  Clay,  "The  whole  of  his  [Adams's]  first  message  to  Congress  is  re- 
plete with  doctrines  which  I  hold  to  be  unconstitutional." 


33$  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Congress,  Adams  was  not  destined  to  inaugurate.  The  net  re- 
sult of  his  ardor  for  internal  improvements  was  to  furnish  his 
enemies  another  arrow  for  their  quiver. 

Three  events  in  Adams's  administration  illustrate  from  dif- 
ferent angles  the  sectional  opposition  to  his  broad  policy  of 
national  control :  the  Panama  mission,  the  quarrel  with  Georgia 
over  the  Indian  lands  within  her  borders,  and  the  tariff  of  1828. 

The  new  republic  of  Colombia,  with  the  great  "  liberator " 
Simon  Bolivar  as  its  president,  took  the  lead  in  organizing  a 
confederation  of  the  Latin-American  states.  Treaties  were  made 
with  Peru,  Chile,  Guatemala,  and  Mexico  in  the  years  1823- 
1825,  forming  a  military  league  and  providing  for  a  congress  of 
the  states  to  cement  "in  a  most  solid  and  stable  manner  the 
intimate  relations  which  ought  to  exist  between  all  and  every 
one  of  them."  The  ministers  from  Colombia  and  Mexico  ap- 
proached Clay  in  the  spring  of  1825  on  the  subject  of  the 
participation  of  the  United  States  in  the  congress,  which  was 
appointed  to  meet  at  Panama,  and  found  in  the  Secretary  an 
enthusiastic  partner.  President  Adams,  however,  asked  first 
to  be  informed  on  the  subjects  which  the  congress  proposed  to 
discuss,  on  the  powers  to  be  granted  to  the  delegates,  and  on 
the  methods  of  procedure.  He  told  Clay  to  make  it  clear  to  the 
ministers  that  the  United  States  would  not  join  a  military 
league  for  prosecuting  a  war  with  Spain.  When  the  answers 
to  Adams's  questions  came  in  November,  1825,  they  proved 
very  unsatisfactory.  No  details  of  powers  or  procedure  were 
given ;  only  the  general  purpose  was  repeated  of  joint  resistance 
of  the  American  republics  to  European  interference.  This  the 
South  Americans  interpreted  as  the  meaning  of  the  Monroe 
Doctrine.  It  was,  of  course,  far  removed  from  Monroe's  in- 
tention to  pledge  the  United  States  to  go  to  war  on  the  judgment 
and  initiation  of  the  Latin-American  states.  Adams  wanted  the 
United  States  to  be  represented  at  Panama,  however,  and  in  his 
message  to  Congress  on  the  subject,  in  the  winter  of  1825,  he 
gave  his  own  interpretation  of  the  purpose  of  the.  meeting, 
dwelling  on  the  opportunity  of  improving  our  commerce  with 
Latin  America,  of  forwarding  the  principles  of  maritime  neu- 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  339 

trality,  and  even  of  exerting  the  moral  influence  of  the  United 
States  for  the  advancement  of  religious  liberty. 

But  behind  these  amiable  considerations  of  commercial  policy 
and  missionary  zeal  there  was  involved  a  very  definite  question 
of  American  expansion  and  the  slavery  interests.  The  rich  island 
colonies  of  Cuba  and  Porto  Rico  offered  a  tempting  prize  to 
European  nations  in  Spain's  extremity.  As  Secretary  of  State  in 
Monroe's  cabinet,  Adams  had  already  warned  our  ministers 
abroad  that  the  United  States  could  not  allow  France  to  seize 
these  islands  in  her  crusade  to  reestablish  absolutism  in  Spain,  or 
England  to  take  them  as  a  reward  for  alliance  with  Spain  in  de- 
feating the  French  invasion.  He  had  even  gone  so  far  as  to  say 
that  in  looking  forward  half  a  century  it  was  "  impossible  to 
resist  the  conviction  that  the  annexation  of  Cuba  to  the  United 
States"  would  be  "indispensable  to  the  continuation  of  the 
Union  itself."  The  danger  of  the  seizure  of  the  islands  by  a 
European  power  seemed  removed  by  the  announcement  of  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  (although  Clay  made  the  appearance  of  a 
French  fleet  off  Cuba  in  the  summer  of  1825  a  subject  for 
remonstrance) ;  but  there  had  arisen  the  new  danger  that  the 
league  of  Latin-American  republics  might  themselves  under- 
take the  liberation  of  Cuba  and  Porto  Rico  from  Spain. 

Adams  made  it  clear  that  his  object  was  to  preserve  things 
as  they  were  in  the  islands  of  the  Caribbean,  and  Clay  wrote 
to  his  friend  Bolivar  to  dissuade  him  from  plans  of  conquest 
there.  Yet  the  Southern  statesmen  deliberately  misrepresented 
the  purposes  of  the  administration.  They  professed  to  know 
the  mind  of  President  Adams  better  than  he  knew  it  himself. 
"It  is  clearly  the  intent  of  the  President,"  said  White  of  Ten- 
nessee in  the  Senate,  "to  enter  into  an  agreement  at  Panama 
that  if  the  powers  of  Europe  make  common  cause  with  Spain 
we  shall  unite  with  Spanish-America  to  resist  them."  But  it 
was  clearly  in  the  words  of  the  President  that  he  would  do  no 
such  thing.  The  Southern  senators  maintained  also  that  par- 
ticipation in  the  congress  would  mean  indorsement  of  the  plan 
to  emancipate  the  blacks  in  the  islands  of  Cuba  and  Porto 
Rico,  and  perhaps  the  establishment  there  of  negro  republics 


340  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

like  Haiti.  Our  participation  in  such  plans  was  not  for  a 
moment  dreamed  of  by  the  administration,  yet  senator  after 
senator  returned  to  the  charge.  Hayne  of  South  Carolina 
declared  that  the  discussion  of  slavery  was  not  to  be  tolerated 
by  the  federal  government  or  the  free  states,  and  that  "on  the 
very  day  when  the  unhallowed  attempt  should  be  made"  to 
interfere  with  the  domestic  institution  of  the  South  "we  shall 
consider  ourselves  as  driven  from  the  Union."  Benton  of  Mis- 
souri protested  against  our  entering  into  diplomatic  relations 
with  Haiti,  "because  the  peace  of  eleven  states  of  this  Union  will 
not  permit  black  consuls  and  ambassadors  to  establish  them- 
selves in  our  cities  and  parade  through  our  country  and  give 
their  fellow  blacks  in  the  United  States  proof  in  hand  of  the 
honors  which  await  them  for  a  like  successful  effort  [of  revo- 
lution] on  their  part." 

The  Senate  committee  reported  unfavorably  on  the  Panama 
project,  but  the  report  was  voted  down  and  Adams's  envoys 
were  confirmed  by  the  narrow  vote  of  24  to  19.  It  was  an  empty 
victory  for  the  administration.  One  of  the  envoys  died  on  his 
way  to  the  congress,  and  the  other  arrived  only  after  the  meet- 
ing had  adjourned.  The  congress  itself  was  a  complete  failure. 
The  net  result  of  the  whole  business  for  the  United  States  was 
the  increase  of  sectional  feeling.  Especially  ominous  were  the 
bitter  debates  in  the  Senate  on  the  slavery  issue  in  the  congress. 

At  the  same  time  a  long-standing  controversy  between  the 
state  of  Georgia  and  the  national  government  came  to  a  head. 
When  Georgia,  in  1802,  ceded  to  the  United  States  her  charter 
claims  to  lands  as  far  west  as  the  Mississippi,  it  was  with  the 
provision  that  the  national  government  should  secure  by  treaty 
the  extinction  of  the  Indian  claims  within  the  borders  of  the 
state.  The  matter  had  dragged  on  for  a  score  of  years  before 
the  government  had  acquired  some  15,000,000  acres  from  the 
Creeks  and  Cherokees — scarcely  more  than  half  the  immense 
area  in  Georgia  occupied  by  these  fairly  civilized  tribes.1  The 

1  Their  total  holdings  in  Georgia  in  1802  were  25,000,000  acres,  equal  to  the 
whole  area  of  the  New  England  states  excepting  Maine,  and  more  than  the  area 
of  the  state  of  South  Carolina. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  341 

state  was  impatient  with  the  dilatoriness  of  the  government  at 
Washington,  its  impatience  growing  to  exasperation  when  the 
Western  boom  that  had  followed  the  War  of  1812  sent  the  prices 
of  land  and  cotton  soaring.  In  1819  the  legislature  of  Georgia 
began  to  protest,  alleging  not  only  that  the  government  did  not 
remove  the  Indians,  but  that  by  conferring  citizenship  on  the 
Cherokees  and  encouraging  them  in  the  arts  of  civilization  it 
was  virtually  assuring  them  of  a  fixed  tenure  of  their  lands. 
Troup,  the  energetic  governor  of  Georgia,  pushed  the  adminis- 
tration in  the  closing  days  of  Monroe's  term,  but  all  the  re- 
ply that  Secretary  Calhoun  could  get  from  the  Creeks  and 
Cherokees  was  that  they  would  not  sell  one  foot  of  their  land 
nor  would  they  exchange  it  for  homes  beyond  the  Mississippi. 
They  sanctioned  the  penalty  of  death  for  any  chieftain  who 
should  disobey  the  order.  Nevertheless,  some  of  the  Creek 
leaders,  induced  by  cupidity,  signed  a  treaty  at  Indian  Springs, 
February  12,  1825,  by  which,  in  consideration  for  $400,000 
and  trans-Mississippi  grants,  they  ceded  nearly  all  the  Creek 
claims  in  Georgia.  The  Indians  were  given  until  September, 
1826,  to  move  out. 

As  soon  as  the  treaty  was  signed  (the  day  after  Adams's 
inauguration)  Governor  Troup  began  to  survey  the  Indian 
lands.  In  spite  of  remonstrances  from  Washington  and  the 
dispatch  of  General  Gaines  to  Georgia  to  protect  the  rights 
of  the  Indians  under  the  treaty,  Troup  persisted  in  his  course. 
The  state  of  Georgia,  he  said,  was  sovereign  on  her  soil,  and 
the  behavior  of  the  President  was  unreasonable  and  "extraor- 
dinary." The  government  of  the  United  States  was  making 
itself  "the  unblushing  ally  of  savages."  The  Indians  were  but 
tenants  at  will,  anyway.  Georgia  must  and  would  have  the 
lands,  even  if  it  involved  resisting  the  central  government  in 
arms.  When  Adams,  convinced  that  fraud  had  been  practiced 
in  the  treaty  of  Indian  Springs,  negotiated  a  new  treaty  at 
Washington  (January,  1826)  more  favorable  to  the  Indians, 
the  legislature  of  Georgia  denounced  the  treaty  as  "illegal  and 
unconstitutional."  The  state,. it  said,  had  never  devolved  upon 
the  central  government  that  jurisdiction  over  its  internal  affairs 


342  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

which  had  become  vested  in  its  authorities  with  the  extinction 
of  the  king's  power  in  the  colony.  Adams  received  little  support 
in  the  Senate  when  it  appeared  that  persistence  in  his  policy 
would  involve  coercing  the  state  of  Georgia.  He  was  relieved 
from  a  most  embarrassing  situation  by  the  conclusion  of  a 
treaty  with  the  Creeks  late  in  1827,  by  which  they  finally  gave 
up  their  lands.1  The  significant  fact  in  this  controversy  was 
the  defiance  of  the  administration  at  Washington  by  a  "  sov- 
ereign state."  The  victory  remained  with  Troup  and  not  with 
Adams — for  the  former  had  been  heartily  and  unanimously 
supported  by  his  legislature,  while  the  latter  had  been  left  in 
the  lurch  by  a  factious  Congress. 

But  most  serious  of  all  the  manifestations  of  sectional  rivalry 
developing  in  the  Adams  administration  was  the  controversy 
over  the  tariff.  The  growth  of  manufactures  in  the  Northern 
and  central  states  had  been  rapid  and  steady  since  the  recovery 
from  the  panic  of  1819.  During  the  period  of  Monroe's  second 
term  the  capital  employed  in  manufactures  increased  from  less 
than  $100,000,000  to  $160,000,000,  and  the  number  of  workers 
employed  from  a  few  hundred  thousand  to  nearly  2,000,000. 
Only  about  six  per  cent  of  all  this  capital  and  labor  was  to  be 
found  in  the  cotton-raising  states  of  the  Carolinas,  Georgia, 
Alabama,  Mississippi,  and  Tennessee.  Every  session  of  Con- 
gress from  1820  on  saw  the  attempt  on  the  part  of  the  manu- 
facturers to  get  a  new  tariff  bill  passed,  and  their  narrow  success 
in  1824  was  due  to  a  "dicker"  with  the  Western  states,  by  which 
the  duties  on  raw  wool,  iron  ore,  hemp,  and  lead  were  increased. 
But  still  the  woolen  interests  of  the  North  were  not  satisfied. 
England  had  reduced  the  duty  on  raw  wool,  so  that  her  factories 
were  able  to  send  quantities  of  cheap  woolen  goods  to  America. 
The  only  remedy  for  our  woolen  manufacturers  was  in  a  system 
of  minimal  valuations  such  as  had  saved  the  cotton  industry  in 
the  tariff  of  1816  (see  page  287).  A  bill  incorporating  this 
principle  was  passed  in  the  House  early  in  1827,  but  was  de- 
feated by  Vice  President  Calhoun's  casting  vote  in  the  Senate. 

1The  contest  was  not  settled  until  the  Indians  were  forced  by  President 
Jackson,  in  1835,  to  seek  homes  across  the  Mississippi. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  343 

This  bill  (the  Mallory  Bill)  was  the  signal  for  a  violent 
agitation  over  the  tariff.  During  the  long  recess  of  Congress 
from  March  to  December,  1827,  resolutions  of  state  legis- 
latures, conventions,  and  mass  meetings,  indorsements  and 
protests  in  pamphlets,  newspapers,  and  memorials  abounded. 
The  closing  of  the  British  West  Indies  to  American  trade  in 
July,  1826,  had  cut  off  a  valuable  market  for  the  grain  and 
flour  of  the  West,  without  providing  a  compensation  in  the 
growth  of  a  home  market;  while  the  sheep-raising  interest 
saw  with  growing  dismay  the  failure  of  the  domestic  woolen 
manufactures.  It  was  not  difficult,  then,  to  get  the  Western 
states  north  of  the  Ohio  to  join  with  New  England  and  the 
middle  Atlantic  states  in  sending  delegates  to  a  convention  at 
Harrisburg  in  the  midsummer  of  1827  to  devise  a  scheme  of 
high  duties  under  the  name  of  the  "American  System."  The 
South,  at  the  same  time,  began  in  united  fashion  to  resist  the 
tariff  on  principle.  A  rise  in  price  of  woolens  meant  a  large 
addition  to  the  planter's  bill  for  coarse  clothing  for  his  slaves 
and  bagging  for  his  crop,  and  an  increase  in  the  duties  on  iron 
meant  higher  prices  for  his  farm  implements;  while  any  in- 
crease in  tariff  rates  meant  offending  England,  which  took  two 
thirds  of  his  cotton  crop.  The  legislatures  of  Georgia,  South 
Carolina,  and  Alabama  declared  that  Congress  had  no  power 
to  "regulate  commerce"  for  the  sake  of  aiding  domestic  manu- 
factures in  one  section  of  our  country,  but  only  for  the  raising 
of  a  revenue;  and  that  they  intended  to  submit  to  no  other 
interpretation  of  the  Constitution  than  this.  In  an  ardent  speech 
at  a  large  gathering  of  planters  at  Columbia,  South  Carolina, 
Dr.  Thomas  Cooper,  president  of  the  State  College,  asserted 
that  the  avowed  object  of  the  scheme  of  high  protective  duties 
proposed  at  Harrisburg  was  to  tax  the  South  for  the  interest 
of  the  North,  to  deprive  them  of  their  best  customers,  and  to 
reduce  them  to  "colonies  and  tributaries"  of  the  manufacturing 
states.  "We  shall  ere  long  be  forced  to  calculate  the  value  of 
our  union,"  he  cried,  "to  ask  of  what  use  is  this  unequal  alliance 
by  which  the  South  has  always  been  the  loser  and  the  North 
always  the  winner." 


344  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

When  the  inevitable  tariff  bill  was  introduced  into  the  Twen- 
tieth Congress  and  referred  to  the  committee  on  manufactures, 
the  Southern  members,  realizing  that  oratory  was  powerless 
against  interest,  resorted  to  a  scheme  for  defeating  the  bill, 
whose  details  were  confessed  by  Calhoun  to  the  Senate  nine 
years  later.  Instead  of  opposing  the  high  rates  on  raw  materials, 
like  wool,  pig  iron,  and  hemp,  they  raised  them  still  higher, 
adding  duties  on  molasses  and  cordage,  which  were  used  in  large 
quantities  in  New  England.  The  object  was  to  make  the  duties 
on  raw  material  so  high  that  New  England  would  reject  the 
whole  bill.  Politics  entered  into  the  plan,  also.  It  was  the  year 
of  the  presidential  election,  and  the  Jackson  forces  were  la- 
boring with  all  their  might  to  take  the  vote  of  the  Northern 
states  from  Adams.1  It  was  agreed  that  the  Northern  Democrats 
should  support  the  bill,  thereby  getting  credit  for  being  friends 
of  the  protective  system,  while  at  the  last  moment  the  Southern 
Democrats  should  vote  against  it  and,  with  the  expected  aid  of 
New  England,  defeat  it.  This  clever  scheme  to  kill  protection 
by  a  homeopathic  overdose  failed.  New  England  voted  for  the 
bill,  bitter  as  its  ingredients  were,  and  it  passed  the  House  and 
Senate  by  the  close  margins  of  109  to  91  and  26  to  2 1.  President 
Adams  signed  it  May  19,  1828. 

The  passage  of  the  " Tariff  of  Abominations"  led  to  an  out- 
burst of  protests,  threats,  and  warnings  in  the  South  surpassing 
that  of  the  previous  summer.  Governors  of  states  were  appealed 
to,  to  summon  legislatures  and  even,  as  one  South  Carolina  jour- 
nalist wrote,  "to  prepare  for  a  secession  from  the  Union." 
A  boycott  was  urged  against  the  manufactures  of  the  North 
and  the  products  of  the  West.  Southerners  would  go  in  home- 
spun, as  their  Revolutionary  fathers  had  done  in  the  days  of  the 
"  Association"  against  England  in  1774,  and  would  starve  rather 
than  buy  the  beef  and  bacon  of  the  Ohio  valley.  Toasts  were 

1Some  Southern  statesmen  went  so  far  as  to  say  that  the  tariff  campaign  of 
1827-1828  was  started  primarily  for  political  reasons,  to  secure  the  cooperation 
of  the  farming  interests  of  the  West  and  the  manufacturing  and  commercial  in- 
terests of  the  East  in  the  support  of  Adams.  John  Randolph  said  that  the 
only  kind  of  manufactures  the  bill  was  directed  to  was  "the  manufacture  of  a 
president." 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  345 

proposed  at  public  banquets  setting  the  sovereignty  of  the  states 
above  the  authority  of  the  nation,  pledging  independence  as 
dearer  than  union.  "Let  the  New  England  beware  how  she 
imitates  the  Old,"  was  the  contribution  of  C.  C.  Pinckney  of 
South  Carolina.  McDuffie  called  the  Stamp  Act  of  1765  and 
the  tariff  of  1828  "kindred  acts  of  despotism."  Immediate  nul- 
lification of  the  tariff  act  was  advised  by  some,  and  resistance 
"to  the  last  ditch"  against  its  execution.  Hayne  of  South  Caro- 
lina "rejoiced  for  the  South  and  its  liberties  that  the  regular 
army  of  the  United  States  was  a  mere  handful  of  men."  The 
voices  of  the  ex-presidents  Madison  and  Monroe  were  raised 
for  moderation.  Let  a  remedy  be  sought  by  compromise,  as  in 
the  Missouri  struggle.  Let  there  be  no  talk  of  disunion. 

The  election  of  Jackson  over  Adams  in  November  by  an 
overwhelming  majority  gave  the  South  pause.  Every  state  west 
of  the  Alleghenies  and  every  state  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's 
line  except  Maryland  and  Delaware  gave  its  entire  vote  to 
Jackson,  and  he  had  all  the  electors  of  Pennsylvania,  20  out  of 
36  in  New  York,  and  5  out  of  n  in  Maryland  besides — a  total 
of  1 78  to  83  for  Adams.  Although  the  Jackson  men  in  the  dif- 
ferent sections  of  the  country  were  by  no  means  agreed  in  their 
economic  interests,  here  was  a  chance  for  the  South  to  regain 
the  alliance  of  the  West  on  a  political  basis.  Jackson  might  be 
the  reconciler.  He  was  known  not  to  be  keen  for  protection. 
He  was  a  native  of  South  Carolina.  Further  action  on  the 
abominable  tariff  of  1828  was  postponed,  therefore,  until  it 
should  be  seen  what  Jackson  would  do  when  he  should  assume 
the  presidential  office  on  the  fourth  of  March,  1829. 

Meanwhile  John  C.  Calhoun  put  forth  his  famous  "Expo- 
sition and  Protest"  (December,  1828)  denouncing  the  tariff  on 
the  score  of  its  unconstitutionality  and  its  offensive  economic 
discrimination  against  the  South.  The  pamphlet  was  only  a 
resume  of  the  arguments  urged  for  a  year  or  more  past  by 
various  writers  and  orators  of  the  South :  the  noncompetence 
of  Congress  to  lay  duties  for  the  encouragement  of  special 
industries,  the  doctrine  of  the  national  government  as  a  "com- 
pact" between  the  states,  and  hence  the  impropriety  of  permit- 


346  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ting  that  government  or  any  branch  of  it,  like  the  Supreme  Court, 
to  set  itself  up  as  the  final  arbiter  of  the  rights  of  the  common- 
wealths which  had  created  it  and  whose  "agent"  it  was.  If  the 
minority  in  any  section  of  the  country  is  oppressed  by  the  legis- 
lation of  the  majority  in  Congress,  the  remedy  lies  in  the 
"reserved  rights  of  the  states  when  properly  called  into  action." 
That  such  a  minority  was  oppressed  in  the  South  by  the  tariff 
bills  Calhoun  showed  by  a  mathematical  demonstration.  The 
Southern  states,  with  their  tobacco,  rice,  and  cotton,  furnished 
$37,500,000  out  of  the  total  $53,000,000  of  exports  from  the 
country.  It  was  the  proceeds  from  these  sales  which  paid  for 
the  goods  imported.  Hence  some  two  thirds  of  the  $23,000,000 
collected  in  customs  duties  on  imports  was  virtually  paid  by  the 
South.  The  fallacy  of  Calhoun's  argument,  of  course,  was  in 
the  middle  term,  which  boldly  assumed  both  that  the  South 
spent  all  her  money  for  imports  and  that  the  North  spent  none 
of  hers  so.  But  whoever  paid  for  the  imports,  it  was  still  true 
that  the  South  suffered  by  the  tax  on  them.  And  this  actual 
grievance  was  the  sufficient  basis,  in  the  eyes  of  the  South,  for 
Calhoun's  political  theory  and  for  his  economic  calculation. 
The  "Exposition  and  Protest"  marked  Calhoun's  break  with 
the  nationalism  which  he  had  so  ardently  championed  in  the 
decade  following  the  War  of  1812.  Henceforth  he  was  the 
protagonist  of  states'  rights  and  the  interests  of  the  South.1  It 
was  he  more  than  any  other  man  who  prepared  the  way  for  the 
great  secession,  although  he  protested,  and  honestly  protested, 
his  love  for  the  Union,  even  to  that  March  day  of  1850  when 
his  solemn  voice,  for  the  last  time  and  from  the  edge  of  the  tomb, 
warned  the  North  that  obedience  to  its  conscience  in  crying 
aloud  against  the  evil  of  slavery  would  mean  the  provocation  of 
the  South  to  sever  the  bonds  which  were  a  token  of  friendship 

1  Henry  Adams,  in  his  "Life  of  John  Randolph,"  claims  that  it  was  the  ardent 
and  eccentric  Virginian  who  converted  Calhoun  to  the  extreme  states'-rights 
doctrine,  "as  he  sat  rigid  and  statue-like  in  the  vice-presidential  chair  and  lis- 
tened with  pale  face  and  lips  compressed  and  hair  brushed  back  over  his  im- 
perious forehead"  to  Randolph's  doctrines  prophesying  slave  emancipation  as 
the  result  of  arming  the  government  with  power  after  power — over  commerce, 
public  lands,  currency,  etc. 


THE  NEW  NATIONALISM  347 

between  equals  but  a  symbol  of  servitude  when  the  strong 
oppressed  the  weak. 

Into  such  an  era  of  hard  feelings  had  the  tangled  economic 
interests  of  East,  West,  and  South  converted  the  "era  of  good 
feelings"  which  marked  Monroe's  all  but  unanimous  reelection 
to  the  presidency.  The  national  government  had  been  defied,  its 
laws  and  treaties  declared  unconstitutional,  and  the  very  value 
of  its  existence  called  in  question.  "The  hour  is  come,  or  is 
rapidly  approaching,"  said  a  report  of  the  Georgia  legislature, 
"when  the  states  from  Virginia  to  Georgia,  from  Missouri  to 
Louisiana,  must  confederate  and,  as  one  man,  say  to  the  Union, 
'We  will  no  longer  submit  our  retained  rights  to  the  snivelling 
insinuations  of  bad  men  on  the  floor  of  Congress.'" 

The  interests  of  the  South  were  clearly  divergent  from  those 
of  the  North  and  West  on  almost  every  important  economic 
question  of  the  day.  She  had  no  manufactures  to  profit  by  a 
tariff.  The  foreign  market  for  her  cotton  was  far  more  valuable 
than  the  home  market.  She  had  no  need  for  improved  highways 
and  waterways  to  the  West,  for  she  had  no  merchandise  to  send 
over  them.  And,  most  serious  of  all,  she  looked  with  alarm  on 
the  rapidly  growing  power  which  a  full  Treasury  and  unre- 
stricted immigration  were  bringing  to  the  financial  and  indus- 
trial centers  of  the  North,  while  her  own  ancestral  estates 
were  being  sold  for  less  than  they  had  been  worth  in  George 
Washington's  day. 


CHAPTER  VII 

"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON" 

A  more  equal  liberty  than  has  prevailed  in  other  parts  of  the  earth  must  be 
established  in  America. — JOHN  ADAMS 

THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY 

Democracy  is  a  relative  term.  A  literal  rule  of  the  people  is 
possible  only  in  small  communities  like  a  New  England  town  or 
a  Swiss  canton.  In  large  political  units,  like  state  or  nation,  a 
pure  democracy  yields  to  a  representative  democracy.  Instead 
of  "government  of  the  people  by  the  people"  there  is  govern- 
ment of  the  people  by  their  chosen  agents — with  a  great  vari- 
ety of  qualifications  for  both  the  agents  and  the  choosers. 
The  fathers  of  the  American  republic  were  not  concerned  to 
strengthen  democracy  on  these  shores.  They  made  no  pro- 
vision in  the  Constitution  for  enlarging  the  suffrage,  accepting 
as  qualified  to  vote  for  national  representatives  and  presidential 
electors  those  whom  the  various  states  allowed  to  vote  for  "the 
most  numerous  branch"  of  their  legislatures.  And  the  suffrage 
in  the  various  states,  in  turn,  was  quite  generally  the  same 
as  in  the  old  colonial  governments,  which  were  anything  but 
"democratic."  It  is  estimated  that  in  Washington's  adminis- 
tration not  more  than  one  male  adult  in  seven  was  a  voter,  while 
the  actual  direction  of  politics  was  in  the  hands  of  a  small  group 
of  "the  rich,  the  well  born,  and  the  able/'  who  regarded  any 
disposition  of  the  people  at  large  to  interfere  with  their  pre- 
rogative as  a  kind  of  ungrateful  impertinence.  Even  Jefferson, 
who  was  looked  on  as  a  dangerous  innovator  for  his  devotion 
to  the  "French  doctrine"  of  the  rights  of  man,  confined  his 
"democracy"  in  practice  to  furthering  the  interests  of  the  com- 
mon people  through  the  authorities  already  established  instead 

348 


"THE  REIGN- OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  349 

of  overthrowing  those  authorities.  He  made  no  campaign  for 
the  extension  of  the  suffrage  or  the  principles  of  "direct  gov- 
ernment." In  fact,  the  social  soil  of  the  old  states,  with  their 
colonial  traditions,  was  not  favorable  to  the  growth  of  a  real 
democracy. 

It  was  out  of  the  West  that  the  impetus  came.  In  those 
pioneer  communities  beyond  the  mountains  differences  of  social 
rank  disappeared.  Men  were  few  and  they  all  counted.  Vigor, 
self-reliance,  industry,  not  birth,  privilege,  or  wealth,  were  the 
test  of  citizenship.  The  constitutions  which  the  new  trans- 
montane  states  framed  as  they  followed  one  another  rapidly 
into  the  Union  were  almost  all  completely  democratic,  pro- 
viding for  manhood  suffrage,  frequent  elections,  and  popular 
control  of  the  executive  and  the  judiciary.  The  influence  of 
the  Western  democracy  on  the  Eastern  states  was  continuous 
and  strong.  One  by  one  the  strongholds  of  privilege  fell.  The 
suffrage  was  widened,  the  election  of  many  officials  was  taken 
from  the  assemblies  or  special  councils1  and  put  into  the  hands 
of  the  people.  Religious  and  property  qualifications  for  office- 
holding  were  abolished ;  public  education  was  encouraged.  The 
process  of  democratization  was  slow  at  first,  but  came  to  a 
rapid  culmination  in  the  decade  of  the  thirties,  when  Delaware 
(1831),  Mississippi  (1832),  Georgia  (1833-1835),  and  Tennes- 
see (1834)  all  abolished  their  property  qualifications  for  the 
suffrage.  By  1840  Rhode  Island  was  the  only  state  left  in  the 
Union  with  the  old  colonial  policy  of  exclusion  still  unmodified.2 

Second  only  to  the  influence  of  the  Western  states  in  estab- 
lishing the  new  democracy  was  the  growth  of  a  prosperous 
wage-earning  class  in  the  manufacturing  centers  of  the  Eastern 

aFor  example,  two  small  councils  in  the  state  of  New  York  had  controlled  the 
executive  and  legislative  departments  until  the  year  1821.  The  Council  of  Ap- 
pointments of  five  members  named  about  15,000  officials,  and  the  Council  of 
Revision  had  the  power  to  veto  laws. 

2 Rhode  Island  kept  its  old  colonial  charter  of  1662,  which  confined  the  suf- 
frage to  property-holders,  until  1842,  when,  as  the  result  of  an  armed  rebellion 
led  by  Thomas  Dorr  in  support  of  a  "Peoples'  constitution,"  the  conservatives 
were  forced  to  call  a  convention  and  frame  a  new,  liberal  constitution  abolishing 
the  property  qualification. 


350  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

and  Middle  States,  which  had  been  developing  under  the  high 
tariffs  since  the  War  of  1812.  This  incipient  proletariat  was 
fruitful  soil  for  the  seeds  of  democracy.  The  workingmen, 
organized  into  unions,  began  to  make  their  influence  felt  in 
politics.  A  Labor  party  held  a  national  convention  in  Philadel- 
phia in  1833  and  presented  demands  for  shorter  hours,  higher 
pay,  and  sanitary  reforms  in  shops  and  factories.  It  peti- 
tioned state  legislatures  to  pass  laws  in  the  interests  of  labor- 
lien  laws  on  buildings  to  protect  mechanics  from  the  loss  of 
wages  by  the  failure  or  fraud  of  contractors,  relief  and  stay 
laws  to  keep  debtors  out  of  prison,  school  laws  to  give  free  edu- 
cation to  their  children,  and  anti-convict-labor  laws  to  prevent 
the  competition  of  prison-made  goods  with  the  products  of  free 
labor.  The  journeymen  bakers  of  New  York  sent  out  a  mani- 
festo to  the  public  in  June,  .1834,  protesting  against  a  labor  pro- 
gram of  eighteen  to  twenty  hours  a  day  at  starvation  wages,  and 
publishing  a  " white  list"  of  employers  who  had  " nobly  agreed 
to  give  the  wages  required."  A  pathetic  appeal  signed  by  "many 
operatives"  in  the  cotton  mills  of  Philadelphia  represented  the 
folly  and  injustice  of  employing  children  from  six  years  of  age, 
"  confined  to  steady  employment  during  the  longest  days  of  the 
year  from  daylight  until  dark,  and  growing  up  as  ignorant  as 
Arabs  of  the  Desert."  Delegates  from  over  a  dozen  trades  met 
in  convention  at  Boston  in  March,  1834,  to  form  a  general  trade 
union  of  mechanics  "to  settle  dissentions  between  employers 
and  employed"  and  "produce  a  friction  of  mind  and  .  .  .  sparks 
of  intellectual  fire  .  .  .  which  will  electrify,  enlighten  and  warm 
the  whole  body." 

The  political  significance  of  this  economic  and  social  trend 
was  very  great.  Here  were  new  masses  of  voters  to  be  organized 
and  kept  to  party  allegiance  not  so  much  through  the  per- 
suasion of  reason  and  principles  as  by  the  appeal  to  emotion 
and  immediate  material  interests.  The  boss  and  his  machine 
began  to  appear.  Astute  party  managers  flattered  the  ears  of 
the  groundlings.  All  the  tricks  of  political  advertisement,  with 
shibboleths  and  popular  catchwords,  badges  and  banners,  were 
pressed  into  service.  Public  offices  came  to  be  looked  on  not 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  351 

as  honorable  positions  of  civic  responsibility  so  much  as  rewards 
with  which  to  pay  political  obligations.  "Patronage"  became 
the  allotment  of  fodder  from  the  public  crib.  A  classic  remark 
of  William  M.  Marcy  of  New  York  in  a  debate  in  the  Senate 
in  1832,  "To  the  victors  belong  the  spoils,"  has  fastened  upon 
his  name  the  unenviable  and  undeserved  reputation  of  being  the 
author  of  the  "spoils  system."  Marcy  was  only  giving  pictur- 
esque expression  to  an  idea  that  had  been  long  germinating. 
Some  years  earlier,  Edward  Everett  of  Massachusetts  had 
said,  "For  an  administration  to  bestow  its  patronage  without 
distinction  of  party  is  to  court  its  own  destruction." 

The  man  who  was  first  to  take  advantage  of  these  tendencies 
in  our  national  politics,  and  with  whose  name  the  new  democ- 
racy is  indissolubly  linked,  was  Andrew  Jackson.  He  was  the 
first  president  from  the  new  West,  the  first  to  break  through 
the  "dynastic"  succession  of  Secretaries  of  State,  the  first 
since  George  Washington  who  owed  neither  his  selection  nor  his 
election  to  any  agency  of  Congress.  He  came  into  the  White 
House  fresh  from  the  hands  of  the  "people,"  triumphant  in  a 
campaign  whose  chief  rallying-cry  had  been,  "Down  with  the 
aristocrats ! "  The  oft-described  scene  of  Jackson's  inaugura- 
tion on  March  4,  1829,  when  the  "great  unwashed"  throng  of 
farmers  and  laborers,  of  Western  frontiersmen  and  rough  old 
Indian  fighters,  swarmed  into  the  White  House  to  grasp  the 
hand  of  the  "old  hero"  of  New  Orleans  and  fought  in  mq&Uigr 
mannerly  fashion  for  the  sandwiches  and  orange  punch,  was 
looked  on  by  dignified  statesmen  like  Webster  and  Story  as  the 
opening  of  the  reign  of  King  Mob.  But  Andrew  Jackson  lacked 
neither  dignity  nor  poise.  He  was  even  courtly,  with  the  direct 
and  ingenuous  courtliness  of  the  borderer.  He  was  incorrupt- 
ible, intensely  patriotic,  devoted  in  his  attachments — and  in 
his  antipathies.  Trained  by  a  long  and  hard  schooling  in  mili- 
tary responsibility,  he  was  rapid  in  decision,  courageous  in 
council,  and  vigorous  in  action.  With  the  soldier's  virtues  he 
had  the  soldier's  faults,  exacting  a  servile  obedience  from  his 
appointees,  regarding  dissent  from  his  policies  as  insubordi- 
nation, and  carrying  the  zest  of  battle  into  the  arena  dedicated 


352  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

to  peaceful  deliberation.  His  strong  will  he  had  never  learned 
nor  wished  to  learn  to  curb,  and  the  generally  successful  outcome 
of  his  arbitrary  conduct  had  fortified  his  self-confidence.  Excess 
of  zeal  spared  him  the  embarrassment  of  a  lack  of  knowledge. 
His  vigorous  intellect  was  impatient  of  schooling,  and  he  pro- 
ceeded to  conclusions  on  difficult  and  intricate  questions  like 
finance  and  banking  with  sadly  inadequate  light. 

It  was  in  thorough  accord  with  Andrew  Jackson's  character 
that  he,  first  of  all  our  presidents,  interpreted  his  office  as  a 
direct  commission  from  the  people,  appropriating  to  the  full 
the  ample  powers  given  to  the  chief  executive  by  the  Consti- 
tution. Ever  since  the  inauguration  of  Madison,  Congress  had 
dominated  the  executive.  It  seemed  as  though  our  government 
were  approaching  closer  to  the  English  model,  with  the  executive 
as  the  mouthpiece  of  a  parliamentary  majority.  We  have  seen 
with  what  almost  humiliating  deference  John  Quincy  Adams 
waited  on  the  will  of  his  Congress.  Nothing  shows  more  clearly 
the  change  in  the  spirit  of  the  executive  than  a  comparison  of 
Adams's  pathetic  appeal  in  his  first  message  to  Congress — for 
their  "indulgence"  to  a  president  who  stood  "less  possessed 
of  their  confidence"  than  his  predecessors — with  Jackson's  de- 
fiant toleration  of  a  branch  of  the  government  coordinate  with, 
but  in  no  sense  superior  to,  the  president  of  the  people's  choice. 
Jackson  was  concerned  neither  to  "manage"  Congress,  like 
Jefferson,  nor  to  get  into  harmony  with  it,  like  Jefferson's  suc- 
cessors. He  rather  let  it  go  its  own  way  in  the  interpretation 
of  the  Constitution,  while  he  went  his.  He  used  the  veto  power 
freely,  depending  always  on  popular  majorities  at  the  polls  to 
support  his  policies.  For  this  unwonted  exercise  of  his  con- 
stitutional prerogative  he  was  dubbed  "King  Andrew  the  First" 
and  represented  in  cartoons  with  crown  and  scepter,  trampling 
the  Constitution  under  his  sandled  feet.  In  the  House  there 
was  even  talk  of  impeaching  him.  But  however  exasperating 
to  Henry  Clay  and  the  other  congressional  leaders  Jackson's 
selection  of  his  "Pretorian  guard"  of  advisers  or  his  veto  of 
bills  or  his  removal  of  secretaries  might  be,  there  was  nothing 
in  all  these  acts  that  violated  his  oath  to  support  the  Constitu- 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  353 

tion,  or  that  could  by  any  strain  of  interpretation  be  charged 
against  him  as  "treason,  bribery,  or  other  high  crimes  or 
misdemeanors." 

Although  Jackson  had  put  himself  on  record  in  a  famous 
letter  to  President-elect  Monroe,  in  1816,  as  an  enemy  of 
partisan  appointments,  declaring  that  men  should  be  selected 
who  were  "most  conspicuous  for  probity,  virtue,  firmness,  and 
capacity,  without  regard  to  party,"  he  threw  his  doctrine  to 
the  winds  when  he  himself  entered  the  presidency.  Heads  of 
bureaus,  chief  clerks  of  departments,  collectors  and  surveyors 
of  customs,  registrars  of  land  offices,  naval  officers,  marshals, 
district  attorneys,  diplomatic  and  consular  agents,  with  hosts 
of  minor  secretaries  and  clerks,  were  turned  out  of  office.  Be- 
tween March  and  June,  1829,  over  three  hundred  postmasters 
were  dismissed.  To  have  supported  Adams  in  the  campaign  of 
1828,  or  approved  the  "corrupt  bargain"  between  Adams  and 
Clay  in  1825,  meant  an  official's  political  death  warrant.  "Ike" 
Hill,  one  of  Jackson's  most  devoted  henchmen,  playfully  de- 
clared that  "the  barnacles  must  be  scraped  clean  from  the 
Ship  of  State."  There  was  undoubtedly  some  justification 
besides  a  political  victory  for  a  shake-up  in  the  civil  service. 
Many  officials,  by  long  tenure  of  power,  had  come  to  regard 
their  positions  as  a  prescriptive  right,  even  after  they  had  out- 
lived their  usefulness.  The  wits  of  Washington  spoke  of  the 
Treasury  as  the  "octogenarian  department."  But  the  indecent 
and  indiscriminate  haste  with  which  removals  were  made  in 
order  to  build  up  the  new  Jackson  "machine"  opened  the  door 
to  incompetence  and  corruption.  The  "clean  sweep"  was  made 
with  a  very  dirty  broom. 

John  C.  Calhoun,  who  had  been  reflected  to  the  vice  presi- 
dency, expected  to  wield  a  large  influence  in  the  Jackson  ad- 
ministration and  to  succeed  the  "old  hero"  in  the  presidency 
in  1833.  For  a  single  term  was  one  of  tfye  Democratic  profes- 
sions ostentatiously  put  forward  by  Jackson — until  he  became 
convinced  of  the  desirability  of  a  second  term.  Calhoun's  serv- 
ices entitled  him  to  great  expectations.  He  had  labored  as  vice 
president  for  four  years  in  Washington  to  bring  the  Adams-Clay 


354  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

administration  into  disgrace  and  smooth  the  way  for  Jack- 
son's succession.  He  had  thrown  his  enormous  influence  in 
the  South  in  favor  of  Jackson,  defeating  whatever  chances 
Crawford  might  have  to  contest  the  election  of  1828.  He  had 
advised  South  Carolina  and  her  sister  states  of  the  South  to 
defer  any  action  on  the  oppressive  tariff  of  1828  until  Jackson's 
administration  should  have  come  into  office,  believing  that  his 
opinion  would  have  decisive  weight  with  a  president  who  was  con- 
fessedly not  very  conversant  with  theories  of  taxation.  But  one 
thing  after  another  came  to  spoil  the  influence  of  Calhoun  and 
the  extreme  Southern  wing  of  the  Democracy  with  the  adminis- 
tration. Martin  Van  Buren,  a  shrewd  politician  of  New  York,  a 
Crawford  man  in  1824  but  since  then  the  chief  lieutenant  of 
Jackson  in  the  state,  was  given  the  first  place  in  the  cabinet.  Van 
Buren  was  bland,  insinuating,  and  deferential,  a  servant  after 
Jackson's  own  heart.  His  influence  with  the  President  grew 
daily  and  was  firmly  established  when  he  espoused  Jackson's  side 
in  a  social  quarrel  which  convulsed  the  cabinet  and  the  capital.1 
Besides,  Jackson,  being  a  strong  Union  man,  already  scented 
danger  to  the  central  government  and  his  own  authority  in  the 
attitude  of  South  Carolina  on  the  tariff ;  for  although  Calhoun's 
authorship  of  the  " Exposition  and  Protest"  was  not  yet  ac- 
knowledged, he  was  known  to  be  moving  fast  in  the  direction 
of  particularism  and  states'  rights. 

The  event  which  caused  the  final  break  between  Jackson  and 
the  ambitious  vice  president,  however,  was  the  revelation,  dia- 
bolically sprung  by  Crawford  at  the  psychological  moment,  of 
Calhoun's  "treachery"  to  Jackson  a  decade  before.  Calhoun, 
Crawford,  and  Adams  had  all  been  members  of  Monroe's  cabinet 
in  1818,  when  Jackson's  conduct  in  the  Seminole  War  had  been 

1  Jackson's  Secretary  of  War,  John  Eaton,  had  married,  only  a  few  weeks  before 
entering  the  cabinet,  a  widow  who  in  her  girlhood  had  been  known  as  Peggy 
O'Neill,  the  daughter  of  a  Washington  tavern-keeper.  Stories  were  circulated  re- 
flecting on  Mrs.  Eaton's  character,  and  the  ladies  of  the  administration,  beginning 
with  Mrs.  Calhoun,  refused  to  receive  Mrs.  Eaton  as  a  social  equal  or  attend  the 
functions  to  which  she  was  invited.  Jackson  believed  none  of  the  scandal,  but 
treated  the  charming,  witty  wife  of  his  Secretary  of  War  with  chivalrous  atten- 
tion. Van  Buren,  being  a  widower,  was  free  to  follow  his  chief  in  the  same  course. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  355 

under  discussion  (p.  302  ) .  Jackson  had  believed  at  the  time,  and 
had  continued  to  believe,  that  Calhoun  had  upheld  his  action  in 
the  invasion  of  Florida  then  and  that  Adams  had  opposed  him, 
whereas  the  truth  was  that  Adams  had  upheld  him  and  Calhoun 
had  proposed  that  he  should  be  recalled  and  court-martialed. 
When  Jackson  heard  this  new  version  of  the  affair,  nearly  a  year 
after  he  had  entered  the  presidency,  he  immediately  called  upon 
Calhoun  for  an  explanation.  The  Vice  President,  greatly  embar- 
rassed and  anxious  to  restore  his  waning  influence,  shrank  from  a 
manly  confession  of  the  whole  truth.  He  produced  a  labored 
and  unconvincing  apology  for  his  conduct,  which  served  only  to 
make  his  offense  doubly  deep  in  Jackson's  eyes.  All  public  con- 
fidence and  private  friendship  between  the  two  men  was 
forever  ended.  Shortly  afterward  Jackson  entirely  reorganized 
his  cabinet  in  order  to  exclude  the  partisans  of  Calhoun ;  and,  a 
few  months  later  still,  Calhoun  himself  resigned  the  vice  presi- 
dency and  entered  the  Senate  as  the  champion  of  the  doctrines 
of  state  sovereignty  and  a  weakened  Union,  which  were  most 
detestable  to  Andrew  Jackson. 

The  breach  between  the  administration  and  the  great  leader 
of  the  South  was  far  more  significant  than  any  mere  personal 
or  factional  quarrel.  It  had  a  direct  bearing  on  our  national 
history.  The  South  was  anxious  for  an  alliance  with  the  new 
democracy  of  the  West.  She  tried  to  play  off  the  economic 
interests  of  the  North  against  those  of  the  West  in  the  tariff 
controversies.  She  only  reluctantly  gave  up  her  champion- 
ship of  internal  improvements  (advocated  by  Calhoun  as  late 
as  1825)  when  the  fear  of  increasing  the  power  of  the  cen- 
tral government  outweighed  the  gratitude  to  be  derived  from 
the  benefited  section.  Soon  after  the  opening  of  Jackson's 
first  Congress  the  South  made  another  bid  for  Western  support. 
Senator  Foote  of  Connecticut  introduced  a  resolution  late  in 
December,  1829,  limiting  the  sales  of  public  lands  in  the 
Western  states.  Hayne  of  South  Carolina  replied,  denouncing 
legislation  which  discriminated  against  any  section  of  our  coun- 
try. Warmed  by  his  own  eloquence,  Hayne  left  the  subject  of 
the  resolution  and  launched  into  a  general  condemnation  of  the 


356  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

North  for  its  selfish  policy  of  sectionalism,  as  shown  especially 
in  the  high-tariff  legislation.  He  declared  that  a  way  was  open 
under  the  Constitution  for  a  state  to  be  rid  of  an  oppressive  act 
of  Congress.  When  challenged  by  Daniel  Webster  to  make  his 
meaning  clear,  Hayne  delivered  a  long  speech  on  January  21, 
1830,  in  which  he  set  forth  the  doctrine  of  the  " Exposition  and 
Protest"  in  its  full  vigor.  The  federal  government  was  but  the 
trustee  of  the  states,  in  which  sovereignty  ultimately  resided. 
It  could  not,  either  in  its  legislative  or  in  its  judicial  branch,  be 
the  judge  of  its  own  powers,  for  that  would  be  to  reduce  the 
states  to  mere  "corporations."  Hence  the  federal  laws  were 
subject  to  review  and  even  annulment  at  the  hands  of  the 
sovereignties  which  had  first  called  the  federal  government  into 
being  and  conferred  upon  it  certain  specified  powers.  Thus 
"for  the  first  time  in  the  halls  of  Congress  was  openly  asserted 
the  doctrine  that  the  sovereignty  of  the  states  was  original  and 
paramount,  while  that  of  the  Federal  Union  was  delegated  and 
subsidiary."  Webster's  reply  to  Hayne  on  the  26th  and  27th  of 
January  is  considered  by  many  the  most  powerful  speech  ever 
made  in  the  American  Congress.  He  took  his  stand  squarely  on 
the  ground  that  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  was  the  au- 
thoritative charter  of  government  of  the  American  people ;  that 
it  might  be  amended  by  the  people,  but  must  always  be  obeyed 
as  the  supreme  law  to  which  the  officials  in  every  state  had 
pledged  their  oath  of  allegiance.  He  showed  that  the  assump- 
tion by  one  state  or  another  of  the  power  to  annul  this  or  that 
law  which  it  found  unwelcome  would  result  in  confusion  worse 
confounded.  The  government  of  the  United  States  would 
become  an  absurdity.  The  Constitution  would  be  a  "rope  of 
sand"  to  bind  the  states  together,  and  we  should  be  plunged 
again  into  the  anarchy  of  the  Confederation,  from  which  we 
had  been  rescued  by  precisely  the  creation  of  a  truly  national 
government. 

Jackson,  of  course,  could  have  no  part  in  the  debates  of  the 
Senate,  but  an  opportunity  soon  came  for  him  to  show  his  colors. 
For  the  celebration  of  Jefferson's  birthday  (April  13)  a  banquet 
was  arranged  in  Washington  by  a  committee  of  Southern  states- 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  357 

men,  who  planned  to  use  the  occasion  to  exploit  the  great 
Virginian  as  the  sponsor  of  the  doctrines  put  forward  by  Cal- 
houn  and  Hayne.  Jackson  had  meditated  carefully  on  the 
situation,  taking  council  of  his  advisers  on  the  wording  of  the 
toast  which  he,  as  chief  magistrate,  would  be  called  on  first  to 
deliver.  He  rose,  lifted  his  glass,  and,  looking  Calhoun  straight 
in  the  eyes,  proposed  "Our  Federal  Union — it  must  and  shall 
be  preserved ! "  Isaac  Hill,  who  sat  near  the  President,  in  de- 
scribing the  scene,  said:  "A  proclamation  of  martial  law  in 
South  Carolina  and  the  order  to  arrest  Calhoun  where  he  sat 
could  not  have  come  with  more  staggering,  blinding  force." 
Calhoun  rose  with  the  rest  to  drink  the  toast,  his  glass  trembling 
in  his  hand.  Jackson  stood  silent  and  impassive.  Calhoun  waited 
until  all  had  sat  down ;  then  he  slowly  rose  and  with  hesitating 
accent  offered  the  second  voluntary  toast:  "The  Union — next 
to  our  liberty  most  dear !  "  Then,  after  a  moment's  delay,  and 
in  a  way  that  left  doubt  as  to  whether  he  intended  it  for  a 
part  of  his  toast  or  for  a  preface  to  a  speech,  he  added,  "May 
we  all  remember  that  it  can  only  be  preserved  by  respecting 
the  rights  of  the  States  and  by  distributing  equally  the  benefits 
and  burdens  of  the  Union."  More  toasts  followed,  but  all 
interest  in  the  feast  was  at  an  end.  The  company  (more  than  a 
hundred  at  the  start)  had  dwindled  to  thirty  within  five  minutes 
after  Calhoun  sat  down.  On  the  morrow  Jackson's  friends 
secured  from  Crawford  corroboration  of  the  story  of  Calhoun 's 
behavior  in  the  cabinet  meetings  of  1818.  From  this  moment 
it  was  certain  that  the  enormous  influence  which  Andrew  Jack- 
son had  with  the  new  democracy  of  the  West  would  not  be 
cast  on  the  side  of  alliance  with  the  South  Carolina  school  of 
statesmen. 

But  if  Jackson  brought  joy  to  the  hearts  of  nationalists  like 
Webster,  Adams,  and  Clay  in  his  determination  to  maintain 
the  authority  of  the  Union,  he  disappointed  them  in  his  no  less 
positive  determination  to  defeat  their  program  of  economic 
and  financial  centralization.  It  was  a  democratic  Union,  a  peo- 
ple's Union,  which  he  cherished.  The  people  were  great,  and 
Andrew  Jackson  was  their  prophet.  He  looked  with  distrust 


358  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

on  Congress  as  the  seat  of  aristocratic  privilege.  Had  it  not 
thwarted  the  people's  will  in  1825?  Calhoun  and  Clay  were 
drifting  far  apart  in  their  political  theories,  the  one  toward  the 
pole  of  disunion,  the  other  toward  the  pole  of  Federalism. 
Both  were  equally  abhorred  in  Jackson's  eyes,  and  each  knew 
that  the  " military  chieftain  in  the  White  House"  was  his 
enemy.  As  the  Calhoun-Hayne  school  tried  to  alienate  Jack- 
son's followers  in  the  North  by  championing  the  cheap  sale  of 
public  lands,  so  the  Adams-Clay  school  tried  to  discredit  him 
in  the  West  on  the  issue  of  internal  improvements.  Clay  got 
a  bill  through  Congress  in  May,  1830,  for  the  construction  at 
national  expense  of  a  turnpike  from  Maysville  to  Lexington  in 
the  state  of  Kentucky.  Jackson  vetoed  the  bill,  and  the  country 
at  large  approved  his  action.  The  era  of  internal  improvements 
was  passed,  not  to  be  reopened  until  the  period  following  the 
Civil  War,  when  the  development  of  a  vaster  West  demanded 
the  ample  resources  of  our  national  government. 

The  most  conspicuous  example,  however,  of  the  President's 
leadership  of  the  new  democracy  was  his  appeal  to  the  people 
in  his  mighty  struggle  against  the  Bank  of  the  United  States. 
Jackson  was  not  an  expert  in  the  theory  of  banking  and  finance, 
but  he  saw  in  the  Bank  a  huge  privileged  institution  with  an  op- 
portunity for  sinister  influence  in  politics  through  its  grip  on  the 
business  interests  of  the  country  and  its  arbitrary  distribution  of 
financial  favors.  He  had  the  frontiersman's  prejudice  against 
corporations  with  accumulated  capital,  which  kept  interest  rates 
high  and  discouraged  the  circulation  of  cheap  and  abundant 
currency.  The  Bank  of  the  United  States  especially,  by  its 
power  to  refuse  to  accept  for  government  dues  notes  which  were 
not  secured  by  specie,  held  the  whip  hand  over  the  state  banks 
of  the  West.  Jackson  did  not  begin  the  attack  on  the  Bank,  as 
is  often  asserted.  A  full  year  before  his  inauguration  (March  3, 
1828)  Senator  Benton  of  Missouri  denounced  the  institution  as 
a  private  beneficiary  of  the  public  wealth.  The  Bank,  he  de- 
clared, held  $3,000,000  of  government  deposits,  from  the  loan  of 
which  it  realized  some  $150,000  a  year,  to  be  distributed  to  its 
stockholders,  while  the  government  was  taxing  the  people  for  the 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  359 

payment  of  interest  on  its  public  debt.  The  surplus  should  be 
drawn  out  of  the  bank  and  applied  to  the  discharge  of  the  debt. 
Jackson  was  in  thorough  sympathy  with  Benton  on  this  subject. 
In  his  first  annual  message,  of  December,  1829,  he  declared  that 
a  large  portion  of  the  people  questioned  the  constitutionality  and 
expediency  of  the  law  creating  the  Bank,  and  furthermore  that 
the  Bank  had  failed  to  provide  the  country  with  a  sound  and  uni- 
form currency.  The  first  of  these  statements  was  Jackson's  pri- 
vate opinion,  which  he  had  no  data  to  substantiate ;  the  second 
was  not  true. 

But  Jackson  did  not  judge  the  Bank  on  its  merits.1  It  was 
enough  for  him  that  it  was  an  undemocratic  institution,  a  privi- 
leged corporation.  There  were  rumors  that  the  branches  of  the 
Bank  in  Charleston,  New  Orleans,  Lexington,  and  Portsmouth 
had  contributed  money  to  the  Adams  campaign  of  1828;  and 
the  president  of  the  Portsmouth  branch,  Jeremiah  Mason,  was 
charged  by  Levi  Woodbury,  a  Jackson  senator  from  New  Hamp- 
shire, with  partiality  toward  the  anti- Jackson  business  interests 
of  the  state.  Nicholas  Biddle,  the  able  and  autocratic  president 
of  the  parent  bank  in  Philadelphia,  denied  the  charges  and  main- 
tained that  five  hundred  men  less  implicated  in  the  strife  of  party 
factions  than  the  officials  of  the  Bank  could  not  easily  be  found 
in  the  United  States.  The  Bank  was  not  "in  politics."  But 
Jackson  would  not  be  placated,  even  by  the  appointment  of 
some  Kentucky  directors  out  of  a  list  submitted  by  one  of 
his  cabinet  officers.  A  lively  correspondence  on  the  subject  be- 
tween Jackson,  Biddle,  Ingham  (Secretary  of  the  Treasury), 
Mason,  and  Jackson's  lieutenants  Lewis,  Hill,  and  Kendall 
filled  the  summer  months.  In  his  second  message  (December, 
1830)  the  President  returned  to  the  charge,  advocating  a  Bank 
without  a  charter,  stockholders,  loaning-privileges,  or  note 
issues — a  simple  branch  of  the  Treasury,  to  hold  deposits  but 

1The  Bank  report  of  December  i,  1829,  showed  assets  of  $100,000,000  and  de- 
posits of  $13,000,000,  with  $27,000,000  worth  of  notes  outstanding.  Its  discounts 
amounted  to  over  $40,000,000.  The  stock  stood  at  125  and  the  dividends  were 
at  6  or  7  per  cent.  The  stock  was  widely  distributed  both  in  America  and 
abroad,  and  the  notes  were  considered  as  good  as  gold. 


360  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

to  do  no  discount  business.  Benton  attempted  soon  after  to  in- 
troduce a  resolution  into  the  Senate  against  the  renewal  of  the 
Bank's  charter,  but  was  voted  down. 

Meanwhile  the  House,  through  McDuffie,  chairman  of  the 
Ways  and  Means  Committee,  had  made  a  report  favorable  to 
the  Bank,  which  only  inflamed  Jackson  the  more  against  "the 
hydra  of  corruption."  The  contest  spread  to  the  country ;  state 
legislatures  passed  resolutions  for  or  against  the  recharter. 
When  Jackson  reorganized  his  cabinet  in  the  summer  of  1831 
(p.  355),  the  new  Secretaries  of  State  (Edward  Livingstone) 
and  of  the  Treasury  (Louis  McLane)  both  proved  to  be  friendly 
to  the  Bank.  A  new  series  of  conferences  was  opened  between 
the  administration  and  the  Bank  officials,  and  a  kind  of  truce 
was  arranged.  The  government  was  to  cease  its  attack,  and  the 
Bank  was  to  refrain  from  a  petition  for  recharter  until  after  the 
presidential  campaign  of  the  coming  summer.  Jackson's  mild 
words  on  the  Bank  in  his  third  annual  message  gave  apparent 
approval  of  this  bargain.  He  said  that  he  was  content  to  leave 
the  matter  "for  the  present  to  the  investigation  of  an  enlight- 
ened people  and  their  representatives." 

The  approach  of  the  presidential  year  is  the  explanation  of 
this  situation.  Jackson,  in  spite  of  his  advocacy  of  a  constitu- 
tional amendment  limiting  the  presidency  to  a  single  term,  had 
no  desire  to  relinquish  the  reins  of  government.  Moreover, 
enough  states  had  already  declared  for  him  for  a  second  term 
to  defeat  such  an  amendment  if  proposed.  He  allowed  the  ad- 
ministration paper,  the  Washington  Globe,  to  announce  early 
in  1831  that  he  could  not  retreat  under  the  fire  of  his  political 
enemies  nor  deny  the  people  the  chance  to  indorse  his  policies  at 
the  polls.  His  partisans  saw  the  embarrassment  of  having  the 
influence  and  wealth  of  the  Bank  arrayed  against  them  in  the 
election.  Hence  the  truce. 

A  very  important  innovation  was  introduced  into  our  politics 
in  the  presidential  campaign  of  1832;  namely,  the  national 
nominating  convention.  It  was  one  of  the  most  conspicuous  fea- 
tures of  the  new  democracy.  The  Constitution  made  no  provi- 
sion for  the  selection  of  a  candidate  for  the  presidency.  The 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  361 

framers  believed  that  the  electoral  colleges  chosen  in  each  state 
would  cast  their  ballots  for  men  of  their  own  choice.  But  it 
was  inevitable,  as  soon  as  national  parties  were  formed,  that 
there  should  be  found  a  way  of  agreeing  on  a  standard-bearer  of 
the  party  in  the  campaign.  A  canvass  of  the  members  of  the 
party  in  Congress  was  the  commonest  method  of  nominating  a 
candidate  down  to  1824,  when  the  congressional  caucus  was  dis- 
approved, by  the  growing  democracy  of  the  West  especially,  as 
arbitrary  and  aristocratic.  It  was  not  right  that  the  president  of 
the  great  American  people  should  be  picked  out  by  a  few  men  in 
secret  conclave  in  Washington.  Crawford,  the  last  caucus  nom- 
inee, got  less  than  half  as  many  votes  in  the  election  of  1824  as 
Jackson  or  Adams,  who  were  nominated  by  state  legislatures, 
conventions,  and  mass  meetings.  But  if  the  congressional- 
caucus  method  was  too  exclusive,  the  nominations  by  separate 
states  were  too  scattering  and  uncertain.  It  was  a  third  party 
of  very  minor  and  temporary  influence  in  our  national  politics 
that  hit  upon  the  scheme,  ever  since  followed  by  all  our  parties, 
of  a  national  nominating  convention.  The  Antimasons,1  origi- 
nating in  New  York  State  in  the  late  twenties,  held  an  interstate 
convention  at  Philadelphia  in  1830.  Nine  states  were  repre- 
sented, and  the  plan  was  adopted  of  holding  a  national  conven- 
tion at  Baltimore  in  the  following  year  to  nominate  candidates 
for  the  presidency  and  vice  presidency  of  the  United  States.  At 
the  Baltimore  convention  of  September,  1831,  where  thirteen 
states  were  represented,  William  Wirt  of  Maryland  and  Amos 
Ellmaker  of  Pennsylvania  were  nominated  as  the  ticket,  and  a 
" platform"  was  published  in  the  form  of  an  address  to  the 
people  of  the  country  to  put  down  the  archfoe  of  democracy, 
Freemasonry. 


!In  1826  a  certain  William  Morgan,  a  bricklayer  of  Batavia,  New  York,  had 
published  a  book  revealing  the  secrets  of  Freemasonry.  For  this  he  had  been  kid- 
naped by  a  band  of  conspirators  and  spirited  away.  He  was  traced  to  Fort 
Niagara,  and  some  time  later  a  body  was  found  in  the  Niagara  River — which 
was  never  proved  to  be  Morgan's.  Indignation  against  the  Masons  for  this 
alleged  murder  grew  to  such  a  pitch  that  the  party  of  Antimasons  polled  33,000 
votes  in  1828  and  128,000  in  1830. 


362  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  National  Republicans  followed  the  lead  of  the  Anti- 
masons.  On  December  12,  1831,  delegates  of  their  party  from 
seventeen  states  met  at  Baltimore  and,  with  but  one  dissenting 
voice,  named  Henry  Clay  for  president.  The  sectional  charac- 
ter of  the  " solid  South"  was  already  foreshadowed  in  this  con- 
vention, not  a  delegate  being  present  from  South  Carolina, 
Georgia,  Alabama,  Mississippi,  or  Missouri.  The  National- 
Republican  convention  did  not  put  forth  a  platform  of  prin- 
ciples, but  it  published  an  address  denouncing  the  administration 
of  Jackson  for  its  abuse  of  the  civil  service,  its  partisanship  and 
incompetency,  its  defiance  of  Congress,  its  attack  on  the  Bank, 
its  dependence  on  a  "kitchen  cabinet"  of  demagogues  in  news- 
paper offices  and  minor  Treasury  posts,  its  hostility  to  our 
judiciary,  its  treachery  on  the  tariff,  and  its  encouragement 
to  the  state  of  Georgia  to  defy  the  supreme  law  of  the  land  in 
the  Indian  treaties  (p.  341).  The  following  May  a  "  Young 
Men's  National- Republican  Convention"  ( called  " Clay's  Infant 
School")  met  at  Washington  and  adopted  a  positive  platform 
for  the  party,  advocating  "adequate  protection  to  American  in- 
dustry," "a  uniform  system  of  internal  improvements,"  the 
final  arbitrage  of  the  Supreme  Court  in  all  cases  arising  under 
the  Constitution  and  laws  of  the  United  States,  and  the  main- 
tenance of  a  stable,  honest,  and  trained  civil  service.  These 
"planks,"  with  the  support  of  the  United  States  Bank,  were 
taken  over,  a  few  years  later,  as  the  fundamental  principles  of 
the  new  Whig  party. 

The  Democratic  convention  also  met  at  Baltimore,  on 
May  21,  1832.  There  was  no  need  for  a  presidential  nomi- 
nation, for  Jacks'on  was  already  the  acknowledged  candidate 
of  the  whole  party.  The  convention  followed  the  President's 
wish  in  naming  Van  Buren  for  the  second  place  on  the  ticket. 
Van  Buren  had  been  appointed  minister  to  Great  Britain  on  the 
break-up  of  the  cabinet  in  1831  and  had  actually  sailed  for 
London.  When  the  Congress  assembled  in  December  the  Senate 
rejected  his  name  by  the  casting  vote  of  Vice  President  Calhoun. 
It  was  a  sweet  morsel  of  revenge  for  Jackson  to  have  Van 
Buren  nominated  for  Calhoun's  place,  where  he  would  preside 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON "  363 

for  four  years  over  the  august  body  which  had  humiliated  him. 
The  Democratic  convention  of  1832  adopted  the  "two-thirds 
rule"  for  the  choice  of  candidates,  which  has  prevailed  in  the 
Democratic  conventions  to  this  day.  The  effect  of  these  con- 
ventions, with  their  platforms  and  addresses,  their  review  of 
public  questions,  their  reports  in  the  press,  their  recommen- 
dation of  nationally  indorsed  candidates,  was  to  stimulate  and 
exploit  the  new  democratic  fervor  and  to  bring  out  a  large  vote 
in  the  elections.  Clay  and  Jackson  stood  out  more  clearly 
against  each  other  than  had  any  competing  condidates  since 
Jefferson  and  Adams  a  generation  before. 

Clay  was  anxious  to  have  the  election  fought  on  a  specific 
issue  and  believed  that  the  recharter  of  the  Bank  was  the  most 
promising  issue  for  the  National  Republicans.  "Now  or  never 
is  the  time  to  act,"  he  said.  Webster  and  McDuffie  agreed  with 
him.  The  Bank  had  a  majority  of  supporters  in  both  Houses  of 
Congress.  A  bill  for  recharter  would  be  sure  to  pass,  therefore, 
and  would  impale  Jackson  on  the  horns  of  a  dilemma.  If  the 
President  signed  the  bill  he  would  be  convicted  of  inconsistency 
with  his  position  of  1829  and  1830 ;  if  he  vetoed  it  he  would  lose 
the  support  of  the  great  state  of  Pennsylvania  and  be  rebuked 
in  the  election  by  the  constituencies  of  the  majority  of  the 
congressmen  who  had  voted  for  the  bill.  A  report  of  September, 
1831,  showed  the  Bank  to  be  in  excellent  condition,  its  stock 
high,  its  liabilities  modest,  its  loans  all  secured,  its  dividends 
steady  at  7^  per  cent.  President  Biddle,  in  spite  of  his  hostility 
to  Jackson,  wished  to  keep  the  Bank  out  of  the  campaign, 
observing  the  compact  made  with  the  Secretaries.  McLane, 
from  the  administration  side,  warned  the  friends  of  the  Bank 
not  to  precipitate  the  question  of  a  recharter.  But  Clay  con- 
fidently and  jubilantly  overbore  all  opposition.  He  secured  the 
introduction  into  the  Senate,  on  March  13,  1832,  of  a  bill 
providing  for  the  extension  of  the  charter  (with  a  few  inconsid- 
erable amendments)  for  a  period  of  fifteen  years  after  its  ex- 
piration on  March  3,  1836.  The  bill  was  passed  by  votes  of  28 
to  25  in  the  Senate  and  107  to  85  in  the  House.  It  went  to  the 
President  on  July  4,  and  six  days  later  came  back  with  his  veto. 


364  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  veto  message  was  the  most  vigorous  one  ever  written  by 
an  American  president.  "It  had  all  the  fury,"  wrote  Biddle, 
"of  a  chained  panther  biting  the  bars  of  his  cage."  Jackson 
condemned  the  Bank  as  an  aristocratic,  un-American  institution, 
over  $8,000,000  of  whose  stock  was  in  the  hands  of  foreigners. 
It  fostered  sectional  jealousy  by  making  the  West  the  financial 
tributary  of  the  East,  since  the  nine  trans-Allegheny  states,  with 
only  $140,000  of  stock  on  which  to  receive  dividends,  were 
paying  over  $1,600,000  interest  on  its  loans.  It  enriched  its 
stockholders  by  dividing  among  them  the  interest  on  millions 
of  the  public  money  held  on  deposit.  It  tyrannized  over  the 
state  banks,  arbitrarily  interfering  with  the  financial  condition 
of  the  various  sections  of  the  country  by  its  power  to  regulate 
discount  rates  and  give  or  withhold  loans.  Even  if  it  had  been 
declared  constitutional  in  John  Marshall's  famous  decision  of 
1819,  that  did  not  mean  that  it  must  or  ought  to  be  established. 
The  President  in  his  executive  capacity  was  as  fully  entitled  to 
judge  what  were  the  agencies  "necessary  and  proper"  to  his 
duties  under  the  Constitution  as  was  Congress  in  its  legislative 
capacity  or  the  Supreme  Court  in  its  judicial  capacity.  "  Each 
public  officer  who  takes  an  oath  to  support  the  Constitution 
swears  that  he  will  support  it  as  he  understands  it,  and  not  as 
it  is  understood  by  others.  .  .  .  The  opinion  of  the  judges  has 
no  more  authority  over  Congress  than  the  opinion  of  Con- 
gress has  over  the  judges ;  and  on  that  point  the  President  is 
independent  of  both." 

Clay  and  Biddle  were  delighted  with  the  veto.  They  believed 
that  it  would  disrupt  the  President's  party.  The  respectable 
men  of  the  East  would  not  vote  for  a  demagogue  who  wished  to 
knock  the  bottom  out  of  their  financial  security  nor  for  a  despot 
who  proclaimed  the  president's  will  supreme  in  the  interpreta- 
tion of  the  Constitution.  But  Clay  and  Biddle  were  mistaken. 
They  depended  on  the  educated  and  reasoning  classes ;  Jackson 
relied  on  the  masses.  The  vast  majority  of  the  voters  knew 
nothing  of  the  constitutional  argument  for  or  against  the  Bank. 
They  did  not  come  into  contact  with  the  Bank  at  all  as  de- 
positors or  stockholders.  What  little  money  they  handled  was 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  365 

in  the  form  of  state  bank  notes.  But  they  believed  in  Andrew 
Jackson,  the  democrat,  the  "old  hero/'  and  when  he  said  that 
the  Bank  was  a  "monster,"  that  it  was  the  instrument  of  a 
bloated  aristocracy  robbing  the  poor  of  their  money  and  sending 
the  rates  of  interest  up  for  the  borrower,  they  rallied  to  his  call 
for  its  overthrow.  State  after  state  gave  its  vote  to  Jackson 
when  the  elections  were  held  in  the  autumn  of  I832.1  When  the 
returns  were  all  in,  it  was  found  that  Clay  had  carried  only  the 
six  states  of  Massachusetts,  Rhode  Island,  Connecticut,  Dela- 
ware, Kentucky,  and  Maryland,  with  49  electoral  votes.  Wirt, 
the  Antimason  candidate,  carried  Vermont,  and  Jackson  the 
other  sixteen  states,  with  219  electoral  votes.  The  popular  vote 
was  687,502  for  Jackson  and  530,187  for  Clay.  Jackson  had 
appealed  to  the  people  over  the  head  of  Congress,  in  the  face 
of  a  strong  and  wealthy  corporation,2  against  the  most  powerful 
rival  the  opposition  party  could  furnish.  He  could  embark  on 
the  important  measures  of  his  second  administration  confident 
in  the  indorsement  of  the  American  people. 

A  French  scholar  and  publicist,  Alexis  de  Tocqueville,  came 
to  our  country  in  1831  with  a  commission  from  his  government 
to  investigate  our  prison  system.  Tocqueville 's  interest  widened 
into  a  study  of  the  whole  machinery  of  our  government  and  of 
the  spirit  of  our  institutions.  His  famous  treatise  on  "Democ- 
racy in  America"  was  the  result.  At  the  close  of  a  section 
entitled  "What  are  the  chances  of  the  duration  of  the  American 
Union  and  what  dangers  threaten  it?"  he  gives  the  following 
estimate  of  Jackson's  character:  "We  have  been  told  that 
President  Jackson  is  an  energetic  man,  prone  by  nature  and 
habit  to  the  use  of  force,  covetous  of  power  and  a  despot  by 
inclination.  All  this  may  be  true,  but  the  inferences  that  are 
drawn  from  these  truths  are  very  erroneous.  It  has  been 
imagined  that  General  Jackson  is  bent  on  establishing  a  des- 

xlt  was  not  until  January,  1845,  that  an  act  of  Congress  was  passed  fixing  the 
first  Tuesday  after  the  first  Monday  in  November  as  the  uniform  day  for  choos- 
ing presidential  electors  in  all  the  states. 

2  The  Bank  spent  over  $50,000  on  the  campaign  against  Jackson.  It  is  true 
that  this  was  after  his  veto  message  and  hence  was  a  measure  of  self -protection. 


366  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

potism  in  America,  introducing  a  military  spirit  and  giving  a 
degree  of  influence  to  the  central  authority  which  cannot  but  be 
dangerous  to  the  provincial  [state]  liberties.  But  in  America 
the  time  for  similar  undertakings  and  the  age  for  men  of  this 
kind  is  not  yet  come  [ !  ] ;  if  General  Jackson  had  thought  of 
exercising  his  authority  in  this  manner,  he  would  infallibly  have 
forfeited  his  political  station,  and  compromised  his  life.  .  .  . 
Far  from  wishing  to  extend  the  Federal  power,  the  President 
belongs  to  a  party  which  is  desirous  of  limiting  that  power  to  the 
clear  and  precise  letter  of  the  Constitution.  He  was  placed  in 
this  lofty  station  by  the  passions  which  are  most  opposed  to  the 
central  government.  It  is  by  perpetually  flattering  these  pas- 
sions that  he  maintains  his  station  and  his  popularity.  General 
Jackson  is  the  slave  of  the  majority ;  he  yields  to  its  wishes,  its 
propensities,  its  demands — say  rather  anticipates  and  forestalls 
them.  ...  He  appears  to  me,  if  I  may  use  the  American  ex- 
pression, to  be  a  Federalist  by  taste  and  a  Republican  by  calcu- 
lation. General  Jackson  stoops  to  gain  the  favor  of  the  majority, 
but  when  he  feels  that  his  popularity  is  secure,  he  overthrows  all 
obstacles  in  the  pursuit  of  the  objects  which  the  community 
approves  or  of  those  which  it  does  not  regard  with  jealousy. 
Supported  by  a  power  which  his  predecessors  never  had,  he 
tramples  on  his  personal  enemies,  whenever  they  cross  his  path, 
with  a  facility  without  example.  He  takes  upon  himself  responsi- 
bility for  measures  which  no  one  before  him  would  have  ven- 
tured to  attempt.  He  even  treats  the  national  representatives 
with  a  disdain  approaching  to  insult.  He  puts  his  veto  on 
the  laws  of  Congress,  and  frequently  neglects  even  to  reply  to 
that  powerful  body.  He  is  a  favorite  who  sometimes  treats  his 
master  roughly.  The  power  of  General  Jackson  perpetually 
increases,  but  that  of  the  President  declines ;  in  his  hands  the 
Federal  government  is  strong,  but  it  will  pass  enfeebled  into  the 
hands  of  his  successor." 

Such  was  the  distinguished  foreigner's  estimate,  curiously 
compounded  of  truth  and  error,  of  the  man  who  was  the 
incarnation  of  the  new  American  democracy. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  367 

NULLIFICATION 

Four  days  after  Jackson  had  vetoed  the  Bank  bill  he  signed 
the  new  tariff  bill.  By  the  first  act  he  bade  defiance  to  the  Clay- 
Adams-Webster  program  in  Congress;  by  the  second  he  de- 
stroyed the  last  hope  of  the  Calhoun-Hayne-McDuffie  forces 
for  support  from  the  administration.  Ever  since  the  appearance 
of  Calhoun's  "Protest"  against  the  "Tariff  of  Abominations" 
in  December,  1828,  the  offended  South  had  been  waiting  with 
fluctuating  hopes  and  fears  for  relief  at  the  hands  of  the 
Southern,  slaveholding,  states'-rights  president  who  had  de- 
feated John  Quincy  Adams.  That  he  was  heretically  indifferent 
on  the  tariff  they  knew,1  but  his  championship  of  the  state  of 
Georgia  in  her  conflict  with  Congress  and  the  Supreme  Court 
in  the  Cherokee  Indian  affair  encouraged  them  to  believe 
that  he  would  defend  also  the  interests  of  his  native  state  of 
South  Carolina. 

Meanwhile  the  progress  of  the  opposition  to  the  tariff  in  South 
Carolina  was  steady.  George  McDuffie  of  South  Carolina,  the 
chairman  of  the  Ways  and  Means  Committee  in  the  House  and 
an  extreme  advocate  of  state  sovereignty,  delivered  a  speech  on 
April  29,  1830,  in  support  of  an  amendment  to  the  tariff,  to 
reduce  the  duties  on  woolen  and  cotton  goods,  iron,  hemp, 
indigo,  and  molasses  to  the  levels  which  had  prevailed  before 
1824.  McDuffie  developed  the  economic  argument  against  the 
protective  tariff,  as  Calhoun  had  developed  the  constitutional 
argument.  He  maintained  that  those  who  produce  the  exports 
of  a  country  pay  the  duty  on  the  imports,  and  consequently  drew 
the  deduction  that  because  the  cotton  and  rice  states  of  the 
South  furnished  more  than  half  the  exports,  they  paid  more  than 
one  half  the  revenue  duties,  though  they  constituted  only  one 
fifth  of  the  population  and  consumed  less  than  one  fifth  of  the 
imports.  The  Northern  majority  in  Congress,  "the  representa- 

xOn  the  subject  of  the  tariff  Iredell  wrote  impatiently  to  Mangum  of  North 
Carolina,  February  4,  1832  :  "Why  does  not  General  Jackson  come  out  upon  it ! 
Why  this  studied  equivocation  in  all  his  messages — Who  can  understand  on 
which  side  he  is  ?  " 


368  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

tives  of  those  who  receive  the  bounty  and  put  it  in  their  pockets," 
were  thus  "laying  the  iron  hand  of  unconstitutional  and  lawless 
taxation  upon  the  people  of  the  Southern  States."  Since  the 
government  had  "  degraded  itself  into  a  partisan  of  the  stronger 
interest,"  no  course  remained  to  the  outraged  minority  except  to 
resist  the  execution  of  the  tariff  acts.  McDuffie's  open  threat  of 
nullification  on  the  floor  of  Congress,  at  a  moment  when  plans 
for  a  reduction  of  the  tariff  were  already  under  consideration,1 
added  to  the  large  majority  by  which  his  amendment  was  voted 
down.  But  his  defiant  speech  was  the  trumpet  call  to  the 
disaffected  elements  of  the  South. 

A  battle  royal  was  waged  in  South  Carolina  between  the  nul- 
lifiers  and  the  antinullifiers,  who  were  nicknamed  the  "nullies" 
and  the  "submission  men"  respectively.  The  "nullies"  had  to 
gain  a  two-thirds  majority  in  both  branches  of  the  state  legis- 
lature in  order  to  issue  a  call  for  a  state  convention.  To  that 
end  they  enlisted  the  power  of  the  press,  held  rallies,  mass 
meetings,  and  public  banquets,  and  sent  out  appeals  to  their 
sister  states  of  the  South.  One  paper  declared  that  the  system 
of  "plunder  and  robbery  on  a  large  scale  by  unconstitutional 
law"  must  be  resisted,  though  resistance  "might  lead  to  disunion 
and  possible  bloodshed."  The  North  would  not  dare  to  push  the 
cotton  states  to  the  extreme  of  secession,  said  McDuffie ;  for  then 
the  South,  exporting  her  $40,000,000  of  produce,  would  control 
the  imports  of  foreign  merchandise  and  cut  off  the  revenues 
which  were  enriching  "the  other  parts  of  the  Confederacy." 
Charleston  would  rival  New  York,  and  the  wealth  of  the  North 
would  be  shifted  to  the  commercial  centers  of  the  South.  The 
mills  of  Providence  and  Lowell  would  be  silenced.  The  busy 
centers  of  industry  in  the  New  England  States  "would  exhibit 
one  wide  unbroken  scene  of  desolation  and  ruin."  As  for  the 


ajust  a  month  after  McDuffie's  speech  Jackson  signed  a  bill  reducing  duties 
on  tea,  coffee,  and  cocoa.  The  near  prospect  of  the  extinction  of  the  national 
debt  gave  promise  of  the  reduction  of  the  national  income  by  a  still  further  cur- 
tailment of  import  duties ;  and  even  though  these  were  so  arranged  as  to  protect 
the  Northern  manufacturer,  they  would  still  bring  a  measure  of  relief  to  the 
Southern  consumer. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  369 

submission  men,  who  exclaim  in  most  pathetic  agonies,  "The 
Union  is  in  danger ! "  and  who  conjure  up  frightful  pictures  of 
war  and  blood  to  alarm  the  timid,  let  them  not  impose  upon  us 
by  so  shallow  an  artifice.  "The  Union,  such  as  the  majority 
have  made  it,  is  a  foul  monster,  which  those  who  worship,  after 
seeing  its  deformity,  are  worthy  of  their  chains." 

Few  went  to  the  extreme  lengths  of  the  fiery  McDuffie. 
Calhoun,  the  real  leader  of  the  nullifiers,  always  protested 
his  love  for  the  Union  and  maintained  that  his  doctrine  was 
the  very  guarantee  of  that  Union  as  it  had  come  from  the  hands 
of  the  fathers.  In  a  long  philosophical  disquisition,  filling  six- 
teen columns  of  fine  print  in  Niles'  Register,  Calhoun  again 
went  over  the  whole  ground  of  the  doctrine  of  "the  right  of  in- 
terposition— be  it  called  what  it  may :  state  right,  veto,  nullifi- 
cation or  any  other  name."  This  right  he  conceived  to  be 
"the  fundamental  principle  of  our  system,  resting  on  facts 
historically  as  certain  as  the  Revolution  itself,  and  deductions 
as  simple  and  demonstrable  as  that  of  any  political  or  moral 
truth  whatever."  Calhoun's  language  was  calm,  but  his  spirit 
was  growing  more  defiant  every  month.  The  break  with  Jackson 
over  the  Florida  matter  had  already  come.  The  cabinet  was 
being  purged  of  his  partisans.  His  friends  were  beginning  to 
urge  his  name  as  the  Democratic  candidate  to  replace  Jackson 
in  the  election  of  the  coming  year.  Personal  resentments 
and  rivalries  thus  entered  in  to  stiffen  his  argument.  He 
was  not  merely  contending  for  an  abstraction — he  was  nursing 
an  ambition. 

Nullifiers  and  Union  men  celebrated  the  Fourth  of  July,  1831, 
in  Charleston  with  rival  bands  and  banners,  as  they  marched  to 
their  respective  rallying-places  for  songs  and  speeches.  In  re- 
sponse to  an  invitation  to  attend  the  banquet  of  the  Unionists, 
Jackson  sent  a  letter  which  was  read  amid  great  enthusiasm  by 
heralds  at  four  points  in  the  hall.  It  was  an  unsparing  con- 
demnation of  any  plan  or  counsel  of  dismemberment.  That, 
said  Jackson,  "would  begin  with  civil  discord  and  end  in  colo- 
nial dependence  on  a  foreign  power  and  obliteration  from  the 
list  of  nations."  The  high  and  sacred  duty  of  defending  the 


370  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Constitution  and  laws  of  the  United  States,  which  he  had  as- 
sumed by  his  oath  of  office,  would  be  performed  at  all  hazards. 
To  his  friends  and  associates  Jackson  spoke  in  even  stronger 
terms — of  hanging  the  first  man  who  defied  the  laws  of  the 
country  to  the  first  tree  he  could  find,  and  of  enforcing  those 
laws  in  South  Carolina,  even  if  he  should  have  to  "  depopulate 
the  state  of  traitors  and  repopulate  it  with  a  wiser  and  better 
race."  Jackson  was  used  to  speaking  in  hyperbole,  but  none 
made  the  mistake  of  taking  his  exaggerations  for  mere  bravado. 
When  Congress  met  in  December,  1831,  the  tariff  became  at 
once  the  subject  of  active  debate,  not  only  on  account  of  South 
Carolina's  threatening  attitude  but  also  because  the  abnormally 
high  rates  of  1828  were  piling  up  a  surplus  in  the  Treasury 
just  when  the  national  debt  was  Hearing  extinction.  It  was 
estimated  that  the  debt  would  be  paid  in  less  than  two  years, 
leaving  surplus  revenues  of  some  $12,000,000.  There  were  three 
propositions  for  tariff  reform.  McDuffie  insisted  that  the  bill 
should  come  from  his  committee  of  Ways  and  Means  and  suc- 
ceeded in  introducing  a  sweeping  measure  for  the  hasty  reduc- 
tion of  all  duties  to  a  basis  of  12^  per  cent  ad  valorem  rate. 
Jackson  favored  a  more  gradual  readjustment,  under  the  leader- 
ship of  John  Quincy  Adams,  chairman  of  the  Committee  on 
Manufactures,  who  was  one  of  the  moderate  protectionists. 
But  Henry  Clay,  in  the  Senate,  was  determined  that*no  item  of 
protection  to  American  manufactures  should  be  sacrificed.  He 
confessed  that  the  revenues  ought  to  be  reduced,  but  contended 
that  the  whole  reduction  should  fall  on  such  imports  as  did  not 
compete  with  our  mills  and  factories.  If  there  was  still  a  sur- 
plus, the  government  should  spend  it  on  internal  improvements. 
Clay  was  confident,  even  elated.  He  had  just  been  triumphantly 
nominated  for  the  presidency  by  the  National-Republican  con- 
vention at  Baltimore.  He  expected,  as  we  have  seen  in  studying 
the  Bank  controversy,  to  drive  the  Jackson  administration  to 
the  wall.  When  he  was  warned  that  his  extreme  measures 
would  provoke  the  South  and  the  President,  he  replied  that 
to  preserve  his  "  American  System"  he  would  "defy  the  South, 
the  President,  and  the  Devil." 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  371 

McDuffie's  "free  trade"  bill  was  promptly  rejected  by  the 
House,  partly  on  its  own  demerits  and  partly  to  rebuke  its 
author  for  his  intemperate  sectional  speech.  The  Adams  Bill,  on 
the  other  hand,  which  was  carefully  prepared  on  the  basis  of  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury's  report  of  December,  1831,  was 
debated  for  nearly  two  months.  Clay's  influence  in  the  Senate 
secured  certain  modifications  for  the  better  protection  of  home 
industries,  and  the  bill  went  to  the  President  on  July  9  with 
a  two-thirds  majority  in  both  Houses  of  Congress.  Jackson 
signed  the  bill  five  days  later.  The  tariff  of  1832  furnished 
some  relief  for  the  Southern  planters  in  the  reduction  or  remis- 
sion of  duties  on  their  supplies ;  but  it  still  left  cotton  and  woolen 
manufactures  highly  protected,  and  registered  on  the  whole  a 
victory  for  Clay's  "  American  System."  The  vote  showed  a 
complete  sectionalization  of  the  country. 

It  was  for  this  disappointing  result,  then,  that  South  Carolina 
had  waited — too  patiently,  as  she  thought — for  four  years. 
From  this  moment  her  energies  were  concentrated  on  the  nullifi- 
cation program.  She  ignored  the  national  candidates  Jackson  and 
Clay  in  the  campaign  of  1832,  throwing  her  electoral  vote  away 
on  John  Floyd  of  Virginia.  Governor  Hamilton  had  already  long 
been  a  champion  of  nullification,  and  Clay's  speeches  of  1831 
had  won  the  important  municipal  government  of  Charleston  to 
the  cause."  In  the  state  elections  of  1832  a  two-thirds  majority 
in  both  branches  of  the  legislature  was  secured,  and  a  proclama- 
tion was  issued  for  a  convention  to  meet  at  the  capital  on 
November  19  to  take  action.  The  convention,  in  spite  of  the 
brave  opposition  of  its  little  group  of  Union  men,  adopted  an 
Ordinance  of  Nullification,  by  the  overwhelming  vote  of  136  to 
26.  It  declared  the  tariff  acts  of  1828  and  1832  "null  and  void 
and  no  longer  binding  upon  the  state"  after  the  first  day  of 
February,  1833.  It  ordered  the  state  legislature  to  pass  laws  to 
carry  the  ordinance  into  effect  and  forbade  any  appeal  to  the 
Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  on  the  validity  of  these  laws. 
It  enacted  an  oath  of  obedience  to  the  ordinance  and  the  laws 
passed  under  it  from  every  civil  and  military  official  of  the  state. 
And  it  concluded  with  a  threat  that  any  attempt  on  the  part  of 


372  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  national  government  to  coerce  the  state  by  shutting  up  her 
ports  or  harassing  her  commerce  would  be  considered  a  just 
cause  for  secession:  "The  people  of  South  Carolina,  absolved 
from  all  connection  with  the  people  of  the  other  states,  would 
forthwith  proceed  to  organize  a  separate  government  and  do  all 
other  acts  and  things  which  sovereign  and  independent  states 
may  of  right  do."  The  legislature  immediately  gave  effect  to 
the  ordinance  by  an  act  authorizing  the  governor  to  call  out  the 
militia  of  the  state  and  accept  volunteers  besides  if  necessary,  to 
provide  for  defense  against  invasion  by  the  forces  of  the  United 
States.  South  Carolina,  in  the  words  of  Felix  Grundy,  "had 
legislated  the  Federal  government  out  of  the  state." 

President  Jackson's  reply  to  the  ordinance  was  prompt  and 
vigorous.  As  he  wrote  to  James  Buchanan, — then  our  minister 
to  Russia  and  the  man  who  twenty-eight  years  later,  in  Jack- 
son's own  high  office,  was  confronted  not  with  the  threat  but 
with  the  fact  of  secession, — "I  met  nullification  at  the  thresh- 
old." In  a  proclamation  to  South  Carolina,  dated  Decem- 
ber 10,  he  declared  in  language  that  echoed  Webster's,  "The 
Constitution  of  the  United  States  forms  a  government  and 
not  a  league."  He  considered  "the  power  to  annul  a  law  of  the 
United  States  incompatible  with  the  existence  of  the  Union, 
contradicted  expressly  by  the  letter  of  the  Constitution,  and 
destructive  of  the  great  objects  for  which  it  was  framed:  to 
say  that  any  state  may  at  pleasure  secede  from  the  Union  is 
to  say  that  the  United  States  are  not  a  nation."  He  wrote  to 
Poinsett,  collector  of  the  port  of  Charleston,  that  on  receiving 
notice  of  the  attempt  to  carry  into  effect  the  Ordinance  of 
Nullification  he  would  have  ten  or  fifteen  thousand  well- 
organized  troops,  equipped  for  the  field,  in  the  city  of  Charleston 
within  ten  or  fifteen  days  at  the  latest.  Jackson  had  already 
taken  measures  to  give  his  words  effect.  General  Scott  was 
sent  to  Charleston,  artillery  was  brought  from  Fortress  Monroe 
to  Fort  Moultrie,  two  warships  were  stationed  in  Charleston 
harbor,  the  customs  officers  were  ordered  to  perform  their  duties 
to  the  federal  government,  and  the  collector  was  authorized  to 
transfer  the  port  of  entry  to  Castle  Pinckney  if  necessary,  where 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  373 

5000  stands  of  arms  with  ammunition  had  been  sent  subject  to 
his  orders.  The  President's  proclamation  was  received  with 
derisive  shouts  of  laughter  by  the  legislature  of  South  Carolina, 
especially  a  paragraph  in  which  he  admonished  them,  "in 
parental  language,  as  sons  of  his  native  state  not  to  rush  to 
certain  ruin."  Governor  Hayne,  who  had  succeeded  Hamilton, 
was  ordered  to  issue  a  counterblast,  and  the  legislature  went  on 
with  its  preparations  for  the  defense  of  the  state. 

The  situation  at  the  opening  of  1833  was  critical  in  the 
extreme.  The  specter  of  disunion  loomed  portentously.  Cal- 
houn  had  conjured  up  a  spirit  which  he  could  not  lay.  He  might 
persuade  himself  in  his  theorizing  of  the  "peaceful"  and  "con- 
stitutional" remedy  of  nullification;  but  when  his  theory,  in  the 
hands  of  practical  men  of  action,  began  to  bear  its  inevitable 
fruit  of  disunion,  he  was  appalled.  He  was  deceived  in  his  be- 
lief that  the  doctrine  of  nullification  would  enlist  the  support  of 
the  whole  South.  One  by  one  the  "co-states  "  rejected  it.  Virginia 
sent  a  commission  to  South  Carolina  to  persuade  her  to  repeal 
the  ordinance.  Mississippi  denounced  the  doctrine  as  "subver- 
sive of  the  Constitution."  If  South  Carolina  decided  to  resist  the 
government  of  the  United  States,  she  would  have  to  do  it  alone. 
Calhoun  was  already  receiving  warnings  of  the  punishment  that 
waited  for  "traitors."  He  was  ready  for  compromise,  and  in 
this  compromise  he  formed  an  alliance  with  the  man  who  was 
most  responsible  for  the  woes  of  South  Carolina — Henry  Clay. 

Clay's  part  in  the  transaction  was  motivated  by  his  opposition 
to  Andrew  Jackson.  He  too  wished  to  see  the  Union  pre- 
served, and  believed,  further,  that  the  laws  of  the  United  States 
must  be  executed.  But  he  abhorred  the  thought  of  having  these 
things  accomplished  by  the  "military  chieftain"  in  the  White 
House,  the  man  who  had  just  humiliated  him  in  the  campaign 
on  the  Bank  issue  and  had  received  from  the  people  another 
four  years'  tenure  of  power.  As  Calhoun,  therefore,  welcomed 
compromise  for  the  sake  of  averting  armed  conflict  between  the 
United  States  and  the  state  of  South  Carolina,  Clay  supported 
it  to  prevent  Andrew  Jackson  from  conducting  the  conflict.  But 
the  truculent  sentiments  attributed  to  the  President  by  Clay  and 


374  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

others  of  his  personal  enemies  were  not  founded  on  fact. 
Although  Jackson  insisted  that  the  laws  should  be  obeyed,  and 
asked  Congress  in  a  special  message  of  January  16,  1833,  for 
the  grant  of  military  powers  to  assure  the  collection  of  the 
revenues  in  South  Carolina,  he  nevertheless  encouraged  at 
the  same  time  the  passage  of  a  new  tariff  law  to  remove  the 
grievance  of  the  South.1 

In  fact,  the  two  policies  of  the  maintenance  of  the  govern- 
ment's authority  and  the  reform  of  the  tariff  went  along  side 
by  side  in  the  closing  session  of  the  Twenty-first  Congress.  But 
the  House,  loath  to  give  satisfaction  to  the  milliners,  dallied 
over  the  Verplanck  Bill  for  the  reduction  of  the  revenue,  while 
the  Wilkins  Bill  (the  "Force  Bill,"  or  "bloody  bill"  as  it  was 
called  by  the  milliners),  empowering  the  President  to  use  the 
army  and  navy  in  enforcing  the  law,  was  held  up  in  the  Senate  by 
the  opposition  of  Calhoun.  There  was  a  deadlock  on  the  ques- 
tion of  which  of  the  policies  should  take  precedence,  and  the 
end  of  Congress  was  less  than  three  weeks  off  when  Clay,  to  the 
astonishment  of  the  Senate,  introduced  a  bill  for  the  gradual 
reduction  of  the  tariff  to  a  20  per  cent  ad  valorem  basis,  extend- 
ing over  a  nine-year  period.2  He  declared  that  he  accepted  the 
disavowal  by  South  Carolinian  congressmen  and  senators  of 
any  purpose  of  rebellion  or  secession,  and  that  he  wished  to  give 
the  state  (which  had  postponed  action  from  February  i  to  the 
end  of  the  session)  an  opportunity  to  recede  from  a  position 
rashly  taken,  by  a  bill  which  should  relieve  the  South  without 
wholly  abandoning  the  protective  system.  Calhoun  hastened 

1  Daniel  Webster  accused  the  President  of  not  wishing  a  tariff-reform  bill  to 
pass,  in  order  that  he  might  have  "the  undivided  honor  of  suppressing  nullifica- 
tion." But  Benton,  who  was  much  closer  to  the  President  and  a  better  interpreter 
of  his  purposes,  wrote:  "Many  thought  that  he  ought  to  relax  in  his  civil  measures 
for  allaying  discontent,  while  South  Carolina  held  the  military  attitude  of  armed 
defiance  to  the  United  States — and  among  them  Mr.  Quincy  Adams.  But  he  ad- 
hered steadily  to  his  purpose  of  going  on  with  what  justice  required  for  the  relief 
of  the  South,  and  promoted  by  all  means  in  his  power  the  success  of  the  bills  to 
reduce  the  revenue." 

2 The  scale  of  reduction  was  as  follows:  one  tenth  of  the  excess  over  20  per 
cent  to  be  taken  off  at  the  close  of  each  of  the  years  1833,  1835,  1837,  1839  ; 
three  tenths  at  the  close  of  1841 ;  and  the  remaining  three  tenths  on  June  30, 1842. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  375 

to  the  support  of  the  bill,  rather  disingenuously  asserting  that 
it  met  the  demands  of  South  Carolina.  He  even  withdrew  his 
active  opposition  to  the  "  Force  Bill,"  which  passed  the  Senate, 
February  20,  with  but  a  single  dissenting  vote.1  The  clause  of 
the  Constitution  requiring  that  bills  for  raising  revenue  should 
originate  in  the  House  stood  in  the  way  of  adopting  Clay's 
measure.  Clay's  ingenious  quibble  that  his  bill  provided  for 
the  reducing  and  not  the  raising  of  revenue  was  hardly  con- 
vincing; but  a  scarcely  less  ingenious  way  of  overcoming  the 
technical  difficulty  was  found  by  Letcher  of  Kentucky,  who  in 
the  last  days  of  the  session  "amended"  the  Verplanck  Bill  by 
substituting  Clay's  for  it  in  toto.  The  House  passed  the  Clay 
Bill,  and  the  Senate  concurred,  March  i,  1833.  On  the  same 
day  the  House  passed  the  Wilkins  "  Force  Bill"  by  a  large 
majority,  though  the  South  Carolinians  called  it  a  brutum 
fulmerij  since  they  had  all  voted  for  the  compromise  tariff, 
which  settled  the  matter  of  resistance.  On  March  2  the  Pres- 
ident signed  both  bills,  and  two  days  later  he  was  inaugurated, 
under  these  happy  auspices  of  reconciliation,  for  his  second 
term.  On  March  1  1  the  South  Carolina  legislature  reconvened 
and  unanimously  rescinded  the  ordinance  of  the  previous  No- 
vember. The  nullification  episode  was  at  an  end,  and  the  fed- 
eral troops  were  recalled. 

As  is  customary  in  all  political  compromises,  both  sides 
claimed  the  victory.  Yet  the  federal  government  had  little 
cause  to  congratulate  itself.  The  state  of  South  Carolina  did 
not  repeal  her  defiant  ordinance  until  she  had  forced  Congress 
to  make  a  drastic  reform  of  the  tariff.  Furthermore,  the  con- 
vention of  South  Carolina,  in  the  very  session  in  which  it  re- 
pealed the  nullification  ordinance,  nullified  the  "  Force  Bill" 
with  complete  impunity.  Whatever  signs  of  relief  there  might 
be  in  South  Carolina,  there  were  none  of  repentance.  The  state 
flag,  with  its  emblem  of  the  coiled  rattlesnake  and  the  palmetto, 


32  of  the  47  senators  voted  on  the  bill.  Calhoun  and  his  followers  left 
the  Senate  chamber  just  before  the  roll  call  began.  Clay  did  not  vote  on  the  bill, 
either.  John  Tyler  of  Virginia,  the  future  president  of  the  United  States,  was  the 
only  senator  who  voted  Nay. 


376  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

was  everywhere  displayed,  while  no  sign  of  the  national  Stars 
and  Stripes  was  seen,  among  the  decorations  at  a  states'-rights 
ball  in  Charleston  in  honor  of  the  men  who  had  volunteered  to 
protect  their  state  against  invasion  by  the  federal  troops. 

Some  historians  have  seen  in  the  failure  of  the  national 
government  to  "meet  the  nullifiers  then  and  there  upon  their 
own  issue  and  break  the  stubborn  pride  of  South  Carolina"  the 
source  of  the  country's  woes  a  generation  later.  "The  sword  of 
civil  war  is  always  terrible  to  draw,"  wrote  Schouler,  "yet  the 
worst  slaughter  in  1833  would  have  been  light  in  comparison 
with  that  which  followed  the  second  provocation  of  this  state  less 
than  thirty  years  later."1  But  to  make  South  Carolina's  seces- 
sion of  1860  the  outgrowth  of  the  half-triumph  of  the  "prin- 
ciples of  disloyalty  and  dissolution  "  in  her  nullification  doctrine 
of  1832  is  a  rash  assumption.  No  event  in  our  history  more 
strikingly  illustrates  the  truth  of  General  Hancock's  much- 
ridiculed  remark  that  "the  tariff  is  a  local  issue"  than  the 
nullification  contest.  It  was  essentially  a  quarrel  between  the 
United  States  and  Charleston,  the  great  port  of  the  South.  But 
the  slavery  issue  was  not  "local."  Slavery  was  the  cause  of  the 
entire  Southland,  and,  so  far  from  being  deterred  from  leading 
that  cause  by  the  memory  of  "coercion  and  abasement"  suf- 
fered in  1833,  South  Carolina  would  have  been,  if  possible, 
only  the  more  spurred  on  thereby. 

Judged  on  its  own  merits  and  without  reference  to  its  possible 
influence  on  the  events  of  1860,  the  doctrine  of  nullification  is 
open  to  grave  criticism.  It  was  founded  on  an  impracticable 
political  theory,  supported  by  unsound  economic  assumptions. 
The  Calhoun-Hayne  doctrine  of  a  state's  being  competent  at 
any  time  to  interpose  to  suspend  the  operation  of  a  law  of 

1  James  Schouler,  "History  of  the  United  States,"  Vol.  IV,  p.  no.  So  Augustus 
•C.  Buell,  in  his  "Life  of  Jackson,"  Vol.  II,  p.  286  (note),  says:  "When  South 
Carolina  in  1 860-61  led  off  in  the  movement  which  only  an  Appomattox  could 
stop  ...  she  was  emboldened  by  exultant  reminiscence  of  having  bullied  a  Union 
with  Jackson  at  its  head.  What  her  behavior  might  have  been  had  she  been  com- 
pelled to  remember  such  a  punishment  as  Jackson  certainly  intended  to  visit  upon 
her,  but  for  the  pusillanimous  compromises  of  ...  Clay  and  Calhoun,  is  yet,  and 
doubtless  will  always  remain,  an  interesting  theme  of  historical  hypothesis." 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  377 

Congress  until  appeal  could  be  made  by  general  referendum  to 
secure  the  approval  of  that  law  by  three  fourths  of  the  states 
meant,  as  Webster  and  others  demonstrated  again  and  again, 
only  anarchy  and  confusion.  We  should  have  returned  to  the 
dismal  days  of  the  Confederation.  "This  everlasting  cant  of 
devotion  to  the  Union,  accompanied  by  a  recommendation  to 
do  those  acts  which  must  necessarily  destroy  it,"  wrote  an  editor 
exasperated  by  Calhoun's  philosophy,  "is  beyond  patient  en- 
durance for  a  people  not  absolutely  confined  in  their  own  mad- 
houses." The  economic  fallacy  which  McDuffie  brought  to  the 
support  of  nullification  we  have  already  noticed  (p.  367).  It 
assumed  that  the  whole  wealth  of  a  country  was  measured  by 
its  exports  and  imports  and  that  the  exports  literally  paid  for 
the  imports,  ignoring  that  major  part  of  a  country's  wealth 
which  consists  of  the  distribution  of  its  products  among  its  own 
growing  population.  On  this  false  hypothesis  the  South  was 
led  to  believe  that  its  distress  was  wholly  caused  by  the  pro- 
tective tariff,  whereas  it  was  in  reality  largely  due  to  the  unpro- 
gressive  character  of  a  stationary  civilization  and  undiversified 
industry  founded  on  slave  labor. 

Furthermore,  granted  that  South  Carolina  had  a  grievance  in 
the  high  tariff,  as  she  undoubtedly  had,  still  nullification  was 
precipitated  on  a  waning  and  not  a  waxing  issue.  The  tariff  of 
1832  was  less  oppressive  than  the  tariff  of  1828,  and  still  further 
relief  was  about  to  follow.  President  Jackson's  successive  mes- 
sages of  1829,  1830,  and  1831  show  a  progressive  interest  in 
tariff  reform,  and  even  the  archprotectionist,  Henry  Clay,  con- 
fessed that  the  surplus  revenue  must  be  reduced  as  the  debt 
neared  extinction.  If  the  South  Carolina  leaders  had  spoken  in 
the  language  of  patience  and  conciliation  instead  of  defiance 
and  even  abuse  of  the  Union,  they  would  have  recommended 
their  cause  to  a  more  sympathetic  Congress  and  country.  As  it 
was,  by  their  defiance  of  the  law  they  shifted  the  issue  from  the 
reduction  of  the  tariff  to  the  preservation  of  the  authority  of 
the  Union. 

President  Jackson  entered  on  his  second  term  at  the  zenith 
of  his  popularity.  He  was  adored  in  the  West  as  the  conquering 


378  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

hero  who  had  fought  the  battle  of  the  plain  people  against 
monopoly  and  privilege.  Whatever  dissatisfaction  his  veto  of 
the  bill  for  the  recharter  of  the  Bank  may  have  brought  in  the 
conservative  East  was  swallowed  up  in  the  rejoicing  over  his 
firm  stand  against  the  milliners  and  disunionists.  He  made  a 
tour  to  New  England  in  the  early  summer  of  1833  and  was 
received  with  a  welcome  that  almost  rivaled  that  given  to 
Lafayette  eight  years  before.  Harvard  College  conferred  on 
him  the  degree  of  Doctor  of  Laws,  to  the  great  disgust  of 
John  Quincy  Adams,  who  refused  to  grace  the  occasion  with 
his  presence.1  The  cities  vied  with  one  another  in  providing 
pageants,  reviews,  and  banquets  until  they  almost  killed  the 
President  with  kindness.  He  was  obliged  suddenly  to  cancel 
his  further  engagements,  in  order,  as  his  physician  said,  that  he 
"  might  get  back  to  Washington  alive."  In  the  South  he  had 
made  some  enemies  by  his  rigorous  measures  for  the  coercion  of 
a  sovereign  state,  but  South  Carolina  had  been  her  own  worst 
advocate  and  was  left  alone  at  last  in  her  threat  of  disunion. 

In  the  few  matters  of  foreign  concern  with  which  he  had  to 
deal  in  his  first  administration  Jackson  acted  with  prompt 
energy  and  success.  Ever  since  the  peace  treaty  of  1783  our 
ships  had  been  shut  out  of  the  prosperous  trade  of  the  British 
West  Indies  by  the  Navigation  Acts.  Again  and  again  (in  the 
Jay  Treaty  of  1795,  in  the  Treaty  of  Ghent,  and  in  special  con- 
ventions and  diplomatic  conversations)  we  had  tried  to  get  a 
relaxation  of  the  laws  which  had  led  to  a  long  course  of  quarrels, 
reprisals,  tariff  wars,  and  smuggling.  John  Quincy  Adams  was 
an  unbending  man,  who,  in  spite  of  his  long  experience  with 
European  diplomatists,  tried  to  force  the  British  ministry  to 
concede  what  he  believed  to  be  our  just  demands  in  the  colonial 
trade.  The  courteous  and  insinuating  Van  Buren  took  another 
tack,  even  allowing  our  minister  at  London,  Louis  McLane,  to 

1  It  is  a  sad  proof  of  the  blindness  which  partisan  zeal  can  cause,  to  read  in 
Adams's  diary  for  the  day  of  the  ceremony,  "Myself  an  affectionate  child  of  our 
alma  mater,  I  would  not  be  present  to  witness  her  disgrace  in  conferring  her 
highest  literary  honors  upon  a  barbarian  who  could  not  write  a  sentence  of  gram- 
mar and  hardly  could  spell  his  name." 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  379 

represent  that  the  people  of  the  United  States  had  rebuked 
Adams's  foreign  policy  by  the  election  of  Jackson.  The  result 
of  McLane's  negotiation  was  the  simultaneous  removal  of  ton- 
nage duties  by  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States,  and  the 
proclamation  by  Jackson,  on  October  5,  1830,  of  open  trade 
with  the  West  Indies  for  the  first  time  in  our  national  history. 
Jackson  had  the  good  fortune  to  prosecute  his  negotiations 
for  admission  to  the  trade  of  the  West  Indies  just  as  Great 
Britain,  under  the  lead  of  Huskisson,  was  breaking  down  the 
Navigation  Acts. 

The  fortunes  of  European  politics  also  favored  Jackson  in 
pressing  the  French  for  the  settlement  of  claims  for  depredations 
on  our  commerce  under  the  Napoleonic  regime.  The  reactionary 
government  of  the  Bourbon  Restoration  was  little  disposed  to 
assume  any  responsibility  for  Bonaparte's  acts,  but  the  revolu- 
tion of  July,  1830,  drove  Charles  X  from  his  throne  and  replaced 
him  with  Louis  Philippe,  a  liberal  monarch  of  the  Orleans 
family,  under  the  restored  tricolor.  William  C.  Rives,  our  min- 
ister at  Paris,  concluded  a  treaty  with  the  new  government, 
July  4,  1831,  by  which  the  United  States  was  to  receive  25,000,- 
ooo  francs  in  satisfaction  of  her  claims,  to  pay  counterclaims  of 
1,500,000  francs  to  France  for  alleged  infringement  of  the 
Louisiana  Purchase  treaty,  and  to  make  a  considerable  reduc- 
tion in  the  duties  on  French  wines.  The  French  government 
agreed  to  pay  in  six  annual  installments  beginning  one  year 
after  the  ratification  of  the  treaty. 

Success  abroad  and  at  home,  the  overwhelming  indorsement 
of  the  people  at  the  polls,  and  the  growth  of  the  habit  of  the 
applauded  exercise  of  power  made  Jackson  more  and  more  of 
an  autocrat  in  his  second  term.  Opposition  developed  on  several 
issues  from  various  quarters,  until  the  anti- Jackson  forces  were 
numerous  enough  to  form  a  new  party  to  contest  the  election  of 
his  designated  successor  in  1836  and  inflict  on  him  a  humiliating 
defeat  in  1840.  But  on  the  fourth  of  March,  1833,  the  political 
sky  was  clear.  We  were  at  peace  at  home  and  abroad.  The 
specter  of  disunion  had  been  laid.  Our  trade  was  lively  and  our 
industries  were  prosperous.  We  were  shortly  to  be,  for  the  first 


380  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

and  only  time  in  our  national  history,  free  from  debt.  To  be 
sure,  William  Lloyd  Garrison  had  begun  the  publication  of  The 
Liberator  in  his  dingy  printing-office  in  Boston,  Nat  Turner's 
negro  followers  had  slaughtered  more  than  three-score  whites  in 
the  massacre  of  Southampton  County,  Virginia,  and  the  first 
antislavery  society  had  been  organized  in  New  England.  But 
as  yet  the  movement  for  emancipation  was  confined  to  a  few 
"  fanatical  abolitionists."  The  cloud  that  was  to  gather  with 
darkening  menace  until  it  should  spread  over  the  whole  land 
and  burst  in  the  awful  storm  of  civil  war  was  still  only  the  size 
of  a  man's  hand. 

While  the  political  excitement  over  the  Bank  charter  and 
nullification  was  stirring  the  land,  transformations  of  great  im- 
portance in  the  economic  and  social  condition  of  the  people  at 
large  were  quietly  going  on.  The  impetus  of  the  newly  enfran- 
chised democracy,  growing  ever  more  conscious  of  its  power, 
was  making  itself  felt  in  the  reform  of  oppressions  and  inhu- 
manities in  many  fields.  The  noisome  dungeons  and  madhouses 
in  which  criminals  were  herded  began  to  be  replaced  by  "reform- 
atories" and  decent  jails.  Cruel  punishments,  like  branding, 
flogging,  and  the  cropping  of  ears,  ceased.  The  death  penalty, 
which  was  inflicted  in  some  states  for  more  than  a  score  of 
crimes,  was  gradually  restricted  until  it  was  applied  quite  gen- 
erally only  to  murder  and  treason.  The  senseless  custom  of 
throwing  men  into  prison  for  petty  debts1  began  to  be  aban- 
doned. Long  and  exhausting  hours  of  labor  on  starvation 
wages,  the  exploitation  of  women  and  children  in  the  factories 
and  mills,  the  helplessness  of  the  workingman  in  the  hands  of 
unprincipled  and  callous  employers,  the  curse  of  intemperance, 
the  debasing  competition  of  prison  labor  with  the  products  of 
free  toil,  the  denial  of  educational  opportunities  to  the  children 
of  the  poor,  were  all  the  features  of  programs  of  ardent 
reformers  of  both  sexes. 

In  the  summer  of  1829  the  first  locomotive  engine  in  America 
appeared  on  a  short  coal  road  at  the  terminus  of  the  Delaware 

1  There  were  nearly  3000  in  debtors'  prisons  in  1830  who  owed  less  than 
twenty  dollars. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"         .    381 

and  Hudson  Canal  at  Honesdale,  Pennsylvania.  A  track  built 
of  wooden  or  stone  rails  had  long  been  used  for  cars  drawn  by 
horses,  and  the  stationary  steam  engine  had  been  common  in  the 
later  years  of  the  eighteenth  century;  but  the  simple  idea  of 
combining  the  steam  engine  with  the  railway  had  to  wait  until 
far  into  the  nineteenth  century  for  its  realization  by  the  English- 
man George*  Stephenson.1  The  first  railroad  of  importance  in 
America  was  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio,  over  which  Peter  Cooper's 
steam  locomotive  drew  a  train  of  cars  in  August,  1830,  tak- 
ing the  grades  and  curves  satisfactorily  at  the  average  rate  of 
1  5  miles  an  hour.  Less  than  two  years  later  this  road,  equipped 
with  300  cars,  was  bringing  hundreds  of  tons  of  granite,  wood, 
and  pig  iron  and  thousands  of  barrels  of  flour  every  week  from 
"the  West"  into  the  busy  port  of  Baltimore.  A  mania  for 
railroad-building  spread  through  the  land  when  once  the  practi- 
cability of  the  new  method  of  transportation  was  assured.  At 
the  end  of  Jackson's  first  term  there  were  29  railroads  under 
construction,  with  1750  miles  of  track  projected  and  nearly 
400  miles  actually  laid.  "Visionary"  men  began  to  talk  of  the 
possibility  of  traveling  all  the  way  from  New  York  to  St.  Louis 
or  New  Orleans  by  rail. 

But  adventurous  spirits  were  already  pushing  out  far  beyond 
any  dream  of  the  terminals  of  the  iron  road,  beyond  St.  Louis 
and  the  Missouri  to  the  vast  region  of  Oregon,  and  beyond  New 
Orleans  and  the  Sabine  to  the  wilderness  of  Texas.  In  that  same 
month  of  April,  1830,  when  Jackson  gave  his  famous  toast  at  the 
Jefferson  dinner  and  McDuffie  on  the  floor  of  Congress  was 


of  the  devices  for  locomotion  in  the  earliest  days  of  the  railroad  are 
very  interesting.  Cars  were  at  first  drawn  by  horses  walking  or  trotting  between 
the  tracks.  To  prevent  their  wearing  out  the  roadbed  or  stumbling  over  the  ties, 
the  horses  were  often  put  into  the  cars,  which  they  propelled  by  the  mechanism 
of  a  moving  platform.  The  passengers  sat  on  benches  on  both  sides  of  the  horse. 
Sometimes  the  cars  were  pulled  up  grades  by  cables  attached  to  stationary  engines. 
Even  sail  power  was  occasionally  used  on  level  stretches.  The  rails  for  the  loco- 
motives were  at  first  wooden  joists  with  strips  of  iron  fastened  on  top  of  them, 
but  the  curling  up  of  the  iron  strips  caused  so  many  accidents  that  the  all-metal 
rail  was  soon  introduced.  For  an  amusing  account  of  the  inconveniences  and  an- 
noyances of  early  railroad  travel  the  student  should  read  the  experience  of  our 
English  visitor  Harriet  Martineau,  in  her  "Society  in  America,"  Vol.  II,  pp.  7-13. 


382  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

threatening  the  manufacturing  states  with  desolation  and  ruin 
if  they  drove  the  South  to  separation,  the  first  traders*  train 
over  the  Oregon  Trail  left  St.  Louis  with  81  men,  10  wagonloads 
of  goods,  and  12  head  of  cattle.  In  the  same  month,  too, 
the  government  of  Mexico  passed  a  law  for  the  suspension  of 
grants  of  land  to  American  colonists  in  the  province  of  Texas. 
The  missionary  and  the  colonizer  followed  the  tracer  over  the 
Oregon  Trail,  while  the  frontiersman  and  the  land  speculator 
went  to  join  the  American  pioneers  in  Texas — the  Austins, 
Sam  Houston,  Davy  Crockett,  and  James  Bowie.  The  stage  was 
being  set  for  expansion  in  the  next  decade  to  the  Rio  Grande 
and  the  Pacific.  In  more  senses  than  one  the  birth  of  our  great 
democratic  nation  came  in  those  wonderful  years  of  the  early 
thirties  when  Andrew  Jackson  was  at  the  helm  of  state. 

THE  TRIUMPH  OF  THE  WHIGS 

When  President  Jackson  suddenly  interrupted  his  festive  visit 
to  New  England  in  the  summer  of  1833  in  order  that  he  might 
" return  to  Washington  alive,"  he  was  already  meditating  the 
stroke  of  policy  which  was  to  precipitate  the  forces  of  opposition 
and  finally  to  send  his  heir  and  successor,  Van  Buren,  down  to 
defeat  in  the  election  of  1840.  The  pages  of  our  history  are 
crowded  with  important  events  in  those  seven  years  which  mark 
the  culmination  and  decline  of  the  Jacksonian  era — with  aboli- 
tionist agitation,  industrial  unrest,  immigration  problems,  diplo- 
matic quarrels,  exploration  and  settlement  of  the  Far  West, 
negotiations  with  Texas  and  Mexico,  wildcat  banking,  over- 
speculation  in  lands,  canals,  and  railroads,  prosperity  and  panic, 
surplus  and  deficit,  the  rise  and  triumph  of  a  new  political  party. 
To  some  of  these  movements  we  shall  revert  when  their 
influence  on  our  national  policy  becomes  acute.  In  this  section 
we  are  concerned  with  the  facts  which  led  directly  to  the  defeat 
of  the  Jackson- Van  Buren  Democracy. 

The  recharter  of  the  Bank  had  been  blocked  by  Jackson's 
veto  of  July,  1832,  and  the  veto  had  been  indorsed  by  the  people 
at  the  polls  the  following  November.  Yet  Jackson  was  not 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  383 

satisfied.  The  "monster,"  as  he  called  the  Bank,  was  a  danger 
in  his  eyes  and  a  thorn  in  his  flesh.  Its  charter  had  still  four 
years  to  run,  and  its  champions  boasted  confidently  of  renewing 
the  fight.  " Emperor  Nicholas"  Biddle  had  spent  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  the  Bank's  funds  in  the  attempt  to  defeat  Jackson  in 
1832.  Would  he  not  spend  hundreds  of  thousands  to  secure  a 
Congress  which  would  pass  the  next  recharter  bill  over  the 
President's  veto !  There  were  rumors  that  the  immense  power 
of  the  "monster"  would  be  employed  to  derange  the  financial 
condition  of  the  country  and  bring  discredit  and  defeat  to  the 
administration.  Already  two  events  had  occurred  which  had 
convinced  Jackson  of  the  unworthiness  of  the  Bank  to  be  in- 
trusted any  longer  with  the  government  deposits.  The  first  was 
its  postponement  for  three  months,  with  the  consent  of  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  of  the  payment  of  $6,000,000  of  the 
3  per  cent  government  loan  of  1792,  which  fell  due  in  July,  1832, 
and  the  secret  arrangement  with  Baring  Brothers  of  London  to 
carry  the  part  of  this  debt  (about  $3,000,000)  held  by  foreign 
creditors  as  a  loan  to  the  bank  at  4  per  cent  interest  for  six 
months  or  a  year  longer.  The  second  event  was  the  presentation 
of  a  bill  of  $17,000  by  the  Bank  to  the  government  for  damages 
for  the  protest  of  a  draft  by  which  our  Secretary  of  the  Treas- 
ury had  tried  to  collect  the  first  installment  of  the  spoliation 
claims  which  the  French  government  had  agreed  to  pay  in 
February,  1833. 

Indignant  that  a  corporation  which  was  already  profiting  by 
the  use  of  nearly  $10,000,000  of  public  deposits  should  present 
a  petty  bill  of  damages  to  the  government,  Jackson  determined 
to  put  an  end  once  and  for  all  to  the  "monster."  He  promoted 
one  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  (McLane)  to  the  State  Depart- 
ment and  summarily  dismissed  another  (Duane)  before  he 
found  in  Roger  B.  Taney  an  agent  willing  to  carry  out  his 
policy.  On  October  i,  1833,  Taney;  in  pursuance  of  a  clause  in 
the  Bank  charter  giving  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  the  power 
to  remove  the  government  deposits  provided  he  reported  to 
Congress,  when  it  met,  his  reasons  therefor,  ceased  to  deposit 
the  government  balances  with  the  Bank  of  the  United  States. 


3  84  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

In  its  place  he  used  twenty-three  state  banks,  called  the  "pet 
banks,"  whose  soundness  had  been  investigated  during  the 
summer  by  Amos  Kendall,  a  member  of  Jackson's  "kitchen 
cabinet."  Taney  did  not  immediately  withdraw  the  balances 
in  the  great  Bank;  but'  the  Treasury  drafts  upon  it  became 
heavier  and  heavier,  until  by  March  i,  1834,  less  than  a  quarter 
of  the  $9,868,000  of  the  government  balance  remained.1 

When  the  Twenty-third  Congress  met  in  December,  1833,  the 
battle  was  on.  Henry  Clay,  the  archenemy  of  the  adminis- 
tration, led  the  attack  by  calling  upon  Jackson  to  submit  to  the 
Senate  the  paper  which  he  had  read  to  his  cabinet  advising  the 
removal  of  the  deposits.  When  the  President  indignantly  re- 
fused to  comply  with  the  inquisitorial  demand,  Clay  followed 
up  the  attack  with  two  more  resolutions,  one  to  the  effect  that 
the  reasons  which  Taney  gave  Congress  for  the  removal  were 
"unsatisfactory  and  insufficient"  and  the  other  censuring  Jack- 
son for  having  assumed  powers  in  his  handling  of  the  Treasury 
Department  "not  granted  to  him  by  the  Constitution  and  laws, 
and  dangerous  to  the  liberties  of  the  people."  The  Senate  re- 
fused to  confirm  Taney 's  appointment  as  Secretary  and  rejected 
the  President's  nomination  of  a  minister  to  England  and  four 
government  directors  of  the  Bank.  In  rejecting  the  nominations 
and  Taney's  explanations  the  Senate  was  acting  within  its 
constitutional  rights,  but  it  had  no  right  to  pass  a  vote  of  censure 
on  the  president  of  the  United  States.  That  high  official  is 
responsible  to  the  people  for  fidelity  to  his  oath  to  support  the 
Constitution  and  can  be  brought  to  judgment  only  by  the 
people's  representatives  in  the  lower  House  of  Congress  through 
impeachment  proceedings  on  specific  charges.  The  only  func- 
tion that  devolves  upon  the  Senate  in  this  connection  is  to  act 
as  a  jury  to  pronounce  the  verdict  in  the  trial.  Jackson  was 
the  last  man  in  the  country  to  submit  tamely  to  an  invasion  of 
his  prerogative  or  to  a  censure  of  his  conduct.  He  sent  a  vigor- 
Jackson  also  pocket- vetoed  a  bill  of  Clay's  for  the  distribution  of  the  pro- 
ceeds of  the  public-land  sales  among  the  states  (a  sort  of  variant  of  internal  im- 
provements at  national  expense),  which  would  have  put  some  $20,000,000  into 
the  hands  of  the  states  for  roads,  canals,  education,  and  colonization. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON''  385 

ous  "counterblast"  to  the  Senate,  which  that  body  in  turn 
refused  to  receive,  as  "  insulting  to  its  dignity  and  an  attack 
on  its  privileges."1 

While  this  unprecedented  quarrel  between  the  President  and 
the  Senate  was  coming  to  a  head,  the  effect  of  the  removal  of 
the  deposits  on  the  Bank  and  the  country  at  large  was  making 
itself  felt.  The  Bank  was  of  course  obliged  to  call  its  loans 
and  contract  its  discounts,  to  provide  for  such  uncertain  de- 
mands as  the  hostile  Treasury  Department  might  make  upon  it 
and  to  meet  a  possible  "run"  by  private  depositors  who  saw  its 
credit  shaken  by  the  government's  attack.  This  readjustment 
of  the  business  of  the  great  Bank  inevitably  threw  into  some 
confusion  the  whole  credit  system  of  the  country.  Money  be- 
came tight,  interest  and  discount  rates  rose,  business  grew 
fearful,  enterprise  was  unduly  contracted,  and  the  labor  market 
was  disturbed.  Clay  drew  a  melancholy,  exaggerated  picture 
of  the  industrial  condition  of  our  "bleeding  country"  in  a  speech 
before  the  Senate  in  March,  1834,  dramatically  summoning  the 
Vice  President  to  repair  to  the  White  House  and  tell  his  chief  the 
doleful  tale  of  depreciation  and  stagnation,  of  bankruptcies  and 
ruin,  and  entreat  him  "to  pause  and  reflect  that  there  is  a  point 
beyond  which  human  endurance  cannot  go,"  before  he  should 
"drive  this  brave,  generous,  and  patriotic  people  to  madness 
and  despair."  To  all  of  which  Van  Buren  listened  with  amiable 
attention,  and,  when  the  harangue  was  over,  left  his  chair  and 
walked  down  the  aisle  of  the  Senate  to  ask  the  orator  with  bland 
politeness  for  a  pinch  of  snuff!  Webster  retouched  Clay's 
gloomy  picture  of  the  industrial  condition  of  the  country  with  a 
juster  hand,  but  still  the  existence  of  "panicky"  feeling  in  the 
spring  and  summer  of  1834  was  not  to  be  denied.  Petitions  in 
great  numbers  came  to  Congress,  and  delegations  waited  on 
Jackson  in  the  White  House,  begging  for  a  return  of  the  deposits 
to  the  Bank  of  the  United  States. 

1  Thomas  H.  Benton  of  Missouri,  Jackson's  champion  in  the  Senate,  fought  a 
determined  campaign  of  three  years  to  get  the  resolution  of  censure  expunged 
from  the  journals  of  the  Senate,  and  finally  succeeded,  after  an  exciting  debate 
mingled  with  hisses  from  the  galleries,  on  January  16,  1837. 


386  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Arguments  and  remonstrances  only  confirmed  the  President 
in  his  position.  If  there  was  a  panic,  it  was  caused  not  by  his 
removal  of  the  deposits  but  by  the  Bank's  policy  of  revenge 
for  the  removal.  Did  not  Biddle  himself  say  that  if  the  charter 
were  renewed  the  financial  difficulties  of  the  country  would 
immediately  cease  ?  If  such  widespread  ruin  as  Clay  described 
was  caused,  as  he  alleged,  by  the  interference  with  the  Bank, 
it  was  the  best  possible  argument  for  putting  an  end  to  so 
dangerously  powerful  a  corporation.  To  the  petitioners  who 
came  to  the  White  House,  Jackson  replied  testily:  "We  have 
no  money  here,  gentlemen.  Go  to  the  monster,  go  to  Nick 
Biddle.  ...  He  has  millions  of  specie  in  his  vaults  lying  idle. 
He  is  trying  to  crush  the  state  banks  and  make  me  change  my 
policy.  .  .  .  But  I  would  rather  undergo  the  tortures  of  ten 
Spanish  Inquisitions  than  that  the  deposits  should  be  restored 
or  the  monster  rechartered."  Finally,  he  declined  to  receive 
further  delegations. 

In  striking  down  the  one  great  "tyrant"  of  the  National 
Bank,  Jackson  had  raised  up  five  hundred  petty  tyrants  in  the 
state  banks.  By  removing  the  stabilizer  of  the  currency  he 
had  encouraged  confusion  in  the  standards  of  paper  issues. 
His  remedy  for  the  evil  was  drastic.  He  would  substitute  a 
metallic  currency  for  paper.  He  urged  the  coinage  of  gold,  and 
his  supporters,  chief  among  them  "old  bullion"  Ben  ton,  con- 
ducted an  amusing  campaign  to  popularize  the  new  coins,  which 
were  dubbed  "Jackson's  yellow  boys"  and  "Benton's  mint 
drops."  Nearly  $1,500,000  in  gold  coin  was  sent  out  from  the 
mint  in  the  summer  of  1834.  Attempts  were  made  to  get  the 
state  legislatures  to  forbid  the  issue  of  notes  under  $20.  But  it 
was  like  turning  the  hands  back  on  the  dial  of  time.  To  return 
to  a  metallic  currency  after  the  use  of  so  convenient  and  trans- 
ferable a  medium  as  paper  was  like  returning  to  rude  barter 
after  the  introduction  of  money.  Jackson  only  revealed  his  limi- 
tations in  financial  science  when  he  indulged  the  hope  of  getting 
the  banks  to  limit  their  issues  of  paper  at  the  same  moment  that 
he  was  encouraging  inflation  by  inviting  competition  among 
them  for  the  government  deposits. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  387 

Jackson's  high-handed  conduct  in  dealing  with  the  Bank  and 
the  deposits  caused  serious  disaffection  among  his  followers  and 
gave  Clay,  Adams,  Webster,  and  other  opponents  of  his  policy 
at  different  points  the  opportunity  to  consolidate  their  forces 
into  a  new  party.  All  the  popularity  that  Jackson  had  gained  in 
New  England  by  his  firm  stand  on  nullification  in  1832  was  lost 
by  his  assault  on  the  national  credit  in  1833.  His  own  state  of 
Tennessee,  to  the  end  of  his  life,  never  again  gave  its  electoral 
vote  to  the  presidential  candidate  of  his  preference.  The 
material  out  of  which  the  anti-Jackson  party  was  built  was 
very  diverse.  There  were  old  National  Republicans,  like  John 
Quincy  Adams,  who  regretted  the  failure  of  the  government  to 
encourage  internal  improvements;  stanch  states'-rights  men, 
like  John  Tyler,  who  resented  Jackson's  threat  to  coerce  a 
sovereign  state ;  financial  interests  injured  by  the  derangement 
of  the  currency  and  banking-system;  and  " Native  American" 
enthusiasts,  who  deplored  the  swelling  number  of  Irish  immi- 
grants, enlisted  generally  under  the  Democratic  banner.  These 
disparate  elements  could  not  have  been  united  on  any  political 
platform,  but  they  found  a  common  bond  in  their  detestation 
of  the  "tyranny"  of  Andrew  Jackson.  The  name  which  they 
adopted  to  signalize  their  opposition  was  "Whigs." 

This  name  had  never  been  entirely  dropped  from  our  political 
vocabulary  since  the  days  of  the  American  Revolution.1  Its 
revival  in  the  spring  of  1834  to  designate  a  new  party  in  several 
of  the  Northern  states  is  thus  described  in  an  article  in  Niks' 
Register,  of  April  12  :  "In  New  York  and  Connecticut  the  name 
'Whig'  is  now  used  by  the  opponents  of  the  administration 
when  speaking  of  themselves,  and  they  call  the  Jackson  men 
by  the  offensive  name  of  'Tories.'"  A  few  months  later  the 
same  journal  notes:  "As  if  by  universal  consent,  all  parties 

1For  example,  there  was  a  New  York  Whig  Club,  whose  object,  like  that  of 
the  City  Club  today,  was  to  encourage  the  interest  of  the  citizens  in  good  gov- 
ernment. During  the  War  of  1812,  when  the  Federalists  were  suspected  of  British 
sympathies,  the  name  of  "Whig"  was  freely  used  in  opposition  to  them.  The  sug- 
gestion of  the  name  as  an  anti- Jackson  slogan  came  from  J.  Watson  Webb,  the 
editor  of  the  New  York  Courier  and  Inquirer. 


388  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

opposed  to  the  present  administration  call  themselves  '  Whigs.'" 
In  the  autumn  elections  of  1834  the  Whigs,  combining  some- 
times with  the  Antimasons  and  sometimes  taking  the  title  of 
"  states'-rights  men/'  made  notable  gains.  They  chose  governors 
in  Massachusetts  and  Indiana,  state  legislatures  in  Rhode  Is- 
land, Ohio,  Maryland,  and  Kentucky,  and  over  40  congressmen 
in  half  a  dozen  states.  Outbreaks  of  mob  violence  were  fre- 
quent at  the  polls,  great  numbers  of  immigrants  and  laborers 
newly  admitted  to  the  franchise  being  marshaled  under  their 
ringleaders  to  "rush"  the  elections  against  the  property-holders, 
the  educated,  and  the  "Native  Americans,"  who  saw  in  the 
rising  tide  of  demagogism  the  ruin  of  American  ideals. 

Before  the  Whigs  had  the  opportunity  to  contest  the  suprem- 
acy of  the  Jacksonian  Democracy  in  a  national  election,  other 
important  issues  arose  to  vex  the  administration.  Chief  of 
these  was  the  abolitionist  agitation.  William  Lloyd  Garrison 
had  begun  the  publication  of  his  Liberator  at  New  Year's,  1831. 
In  1832  the  New  England  Antislavery  Society  was  formed, 
widening  the  next  year  into  the  American  Antislavery  Society. 
Moderate  men  in  the  North  joined  with  the  South  in  the  effort 
to  keep  the  dangerous  subject  of  slavery  out  of  national  politics. 
They  remembered  the  stormy  debates  of  the  Missouri  Com- 
promise :  the  angry  defiance  of  the  Kings  and  the  Tallmadges, 
the  threats  of  secession  and  civil  war  from  the  Cobbs  and  the 
Pinkneys.  But  the  specter  rose  like  Banquo's  ghost  and  would 
not  down.  Occasional  petitions  for  the  abolition  of  slavery 
in  the  national  District  of  Columbia  had  been  sent  to  Congress 
by  Quakers  and  abolitionists,  but  they  had  been  referred  to  the 
little  committee  on  the  District  and  allowed  to  slumber.  With 
the  opening  of  the  session  of  1835,  however,  in  which  the  new 
Whig  congressmen  were  first  represented,  some  of  the  Northern 
members  began  to  debate  the  question.  Slade  of  Vermont 
moved  that  an  abolitionist  petition  be  printed,  and  when  the 
Southerners  vehemently  protested  and  called  on  Congress  to 
disclaim  the  power  of  interfering  with  slavery  in  the  District, 
Slade  took  up  the  challenge  and  delivered  a  fiery  speech  which 
revived  the  passions  of  1820.  He  insisted  that  Congress  had 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  389 

full  power  over  slavery  in  the  national  territory,  and  proceeded 
further  to  " declare  relentless  war"  against  the  institution. 
Southern  members,  like  Hammond,  Jones,  and  Wise,  interposed 
anxious  remonstrances,  and  Calhoun  in  the  Senate  called  the 
petitions  "a  foul  slander  on  nearly  one  half  the  states  of  the 
Union."  The  mischief  was  afoot. 

Meanwhile  the  activity  of  the  abolitionist  societies  was  pro- 
voking hostile  reaction  all  through  the  South.  The  new  Amer- 
ican society  collected  $30,000  for  propaganda,  flooding  the 
states  below  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  with  magazines,  pamph- 
lets, and  tracts — "Human  Rights,"  The  Anti-slavery  Record, 
The  Emancipator,  "The  Slave's  Friend,"  and  the  like.  On  a 
midsummer  night  of  1835  citizens  of  Charleston  broke  into  the 
post  office,  seized  bundles  of  the  offensive  papers,  and  burned 
them  on  the  Parade  Ground  amid  the  plaudits  of  a  large  and 
excited  crowd.  The  postmaster  at  Charleston  wrote  to  the 
postmaster  at  New  York,  whence  the  abolitionist  material  had 
come,  begging  him  not  to  allow  any  more  such  documents  to  be 
forwarded  to  South  Carolina ;  and  the  postmaster  at  New  York 
reported  the  matter  to  the  newly  appointed  Postmaster-General, 
Amos  Kendall.  Kendall's  reply  was  equivocal:  He  could  not 
exclude  the  abolitionist  material  from  the  mails,  but  he  ap- 
proved his  subordinate's  refusal  to  deliver  it.  "We  owe  an 
obligation  to  the  laws,"  he  wrote  to  the  postmaster  at  Charles- 
ton, "but  a  higher  one  to  the  community  in  which  we  live." 
When  Jackson  upheld  this  extraordinary  conduct  in  his  cabinet 
officer,  he  incurred  the  condemnation  of  thousands  in  the  North 
who  had  little  sympathy  with  abolition.  If  the  interests  of 
slavery  demanded  the  infraction  of  the  law,  they  argued,  it 
was  time  that  those  interests  be  curbed. 

The  agitation  over  the  petitions  to  Congress  tended  to  the 
same  result.  So  long  as  the  petitions  were  received  and  referred 
to  the  proper  committee  they  were  left  to  oblivion.  But  when 
the  Speaker  of  the  House,  James  K.  Polk  of  Tennessee,  yielding 
to  the  general  indignation  of  the  Southern  members,  ruled  that 
the  constitutional  right  of  petition  did  not  oblige  the  House 
to  receive  a  petition,  he  made  the  grave  mistake  of  transferring 


390  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  question  from  the  merits  of  abolition  to  the  constitutional 
rights  of  American  citizens.  John  Quincy  Adams,  who  had 
shown  no  leanings  toward  the  abolitionist  cause,  now  took  up 
the  fight  in  behalf  of  the  right  of  petition.  A  battle  royal  was 
waged  on  the  floor  of  Congress  during  the  spring  months  of 
1836,  resulting  in  the  adoption  of  a  set  of  resolutions  introduced 
by  Charles  Pinckney  of  South  Carolina,  to  the  effect  that  Con- 
gress could  not  interfere  with  slavery  in  the  states  and  should 
not  interfere  with  it  in  the  District  of  Columbia;  that  it  was 
"important  and  desirable  that  the  agitation  on  this  subject  be 
finally  arrested";  and  that  "all  petitions,  memorials,  proposi- 
tions, or  papers  relating  in  any  way  to  the  subject  of  slavery 
.  .  .  shall,  without  being  printed  or  referred,  be  laid  on  the 
table,  and  that  no  further  action  whatever  shall  be  had  thereon." 
When  the  roll  was  called  on  this  last  resolution  (the  "  Gag- 
rule"),  John  Quincy  Adams  answered,  "I  hold  the  resolution 
to  be  a  direct  violation  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States, 
the  rules  of  this  House,  and  the  rights  of  my  constituents." 
From  that  moment  the  ablest  statesman  of  the  House  of 
Representatives  fought  the  battle  of  the  abolitionists. 

Professor  Burgess,  in  his  "Middle  Period"  of  American  his- 
tory (p.  274),  declares  that  "it  would  not  be  extravagant  to 
say  that  the  whole  course  of  the  internal  history  of  the  United 
States  from  1836  to  1861  was  determined  more  largely  by  the 
struggle  in  Congress  over  the  abolitionist  petitions  and  the  use 
of  the  mails  for  the  distribution  of  abolitionist  literature  than 
by  anything  else."  That  struggle  welded  the  abolitionists  into 
a  political  party,  whose  influence  increased  steadily  in  the 
national  elections  from  1840  on,  and  whose  principles,  in  modi- 
fied form,  triumphed  in  the  election  of  Abraham  Lincoln 
twenty  years  later.  It  convinced  the  South  that  the  abolition- 
ists were  bent  on  carrying  the  war  against  slavery  into  the  states 
below  Mason  and  Dixon's  line,  and  led  those  states  to  guard 
their  society  against  possible  black  insurrections  by  passing 
severe  laws  against  the  assembling  of  negroes,  their  carrying  of 
arms,  their  learning  to  read  and  write,  or  their  having  in  their 
possession  any  abolitionist  literature.  It  convinced  the  South- 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  391 

ern  leaders  of  the  prime  necessity  of  preserving  their  power  in 
Congress  by  keeping  the  number  of  slave  states  at  least  equal 
to  the  number  of  free  commonwealths ;  whence  their  desire  for 
the  annexation  of  new  lands  suitable  for  the  extension  of  slave 
labor  (Texas  and  Cuba)  and  their  insistence  that  the  great 
trans-Mississippi  territory  be  kept  free  from  antislavery  restric- 
tions. Finally,  the  attack  of  the  abolitionists  on  slavery  as  a 
moral  evil  developed  pan  passu  a  defense  of  the  institution  as 
a  useful  social  arrangement  and  a  positive  material  and  moral 
blessing  for  the  negro.  All  the  scruples  of  a  Jefferson,  a  Ran- 
dolph, or  a  Washington  on  the  justice  or  humanity  of  the  slave 
system  were  hushed,  and  a  new  generation  was  trained  by  the 
apologetics  of  Thomas  Dew,1  Calhoun,  Hammond,  and  Wise  to 
believe  that  the  institution  which  they  were  eventually  to  defend 
in  arms  was  indispensable  to  their  civilization  and  sanctioned 
by  the  laws  of  God. 

In  spite  of  the  abolitionist  agitation,  labor  unrest,  and  grow- 
ing political  opposition,  the  country  seemed  to  be  extremely 
prosperous  as  Jackson's  term  approached  its  close.  The  na- 
tional debt  was  completely  extinguished  at  the  beginning  of  the 
year  1835.  The  revenues  from  the  compromise  tariff  of  1833 
were  ample.  The  sale  of  public  lands,  encouraged  by  the  low 
government  price  of  $1.25  an  acre,  with  easy  extension  of  credit 
and  abundant  issues  of  notes  by  the  state  banks,  and  stimulated 
by  hopes  of  rapid  development  and  huge  profits  in  the  exploi- 
tation of  railroads  and  canals,  rose  from  $4,887,000  in  1834  to 
$14,757,000  in  1835  and  over  $24,000,000  in  1836.  At  the 
opening  of  the  last-named  year  the  balance  in  the  Treasury 
exceeded  $32,000,000.  There  seemed  to  be  no  way  of  stopping 
the  income,  for  the  tariff  was  fixed  by  the  compromise  for  half 

1  Thomas  R.  Dew,  a  professor  of  politics  in  William  and  Mary  College,  was 
the  first  to  announce  clearly  the  new  spirit  of  the  South.  In  1832,  as  a  result  of 
Nat  Turner's  negro  insurrection  in  Southampton  County,  Virginia,  he  published 
a  treatise  in  which  he  maintained  that  the  doctrine  of  the  Declaration  of  Inde- 
pendence that  all  men  are  born  "free  and  equal"  was  false,  that  the  social  and 
economic  interests  of  the  state  of  Virginia  demanded  that  the  negro  be  kept  in 
bondage,  and  that  such  a  condition  was  a  blessing  to  the  slaves  themselves.  His 
book  was  very  influential  in  the  South. 


392  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  dozen  years  to  come,  and  the  price  of  public  lands  could  not 
be  further  lowered  without  prejudice  to  those  who  had  already 
bought.  Various  schemes  for  the  disposal  of  the  surplus  were 
brought  forward,1  and  in  the  end  Clay's  long-cherished  project 
of  a  distribution  of  the  surplus  among  the  states  in  the  ratio  of 
their  population  was  passed  by  Congress  and  signed  by  Jackson 
on  June  23, 1836.  Under  the  Distribution  Act  about  $18,000,000 
was  deposited  with  the  states  before  the  panic  of  1837  came  to 
change  the  surplus  into  a  deficit. 

The  American  people  were  living  in  a  fool's  paradise  in  the 
middle  thirties,  building  air  castles  of  fortune  overnight.  Land 
values  were  immensely  inflated ;  hundreds  of  banks  recklessly 
chartered  by  state  legislatures  were  flooding  the  country  with 
their  unsecured  notes.  The  states  (especially  the  newer  states 
of  the  West)  were  vying  with  one  another  in  grandiose  schemes 
for  canals,  railroads,  and  land  improvements,  incurring  huge 
debts  for  public  works  which  they  fatuously  believed  would 
free  them,  with  the  rush  of  population,  from  the  burdens  of 
taxation.  Indiana,  still  hardly  more  than  a  frontier  commun- 
ity with  less  than  half  a  million  people,  planned  to  expend 
$20,000,000  in  the  construction  of  canals  and  roads.  Illinois, 
with  a  debt  already  on  her  hands  and  the  state  revenues  still 
unequal  to  paying  current  expenses,  rolled  up  a  further  debt  of 
$35  a  head  for  her  population  of  400,000  and  threw  good  money 
after  bad  by  sinking  her  whole  allotment  of  the  federal  surplus 
in  wild  schemes  of  internal  improvement. 

The  first  shock  to  this  fictitious  prosperity  came  from  Pres- 
ident Jackson.  On  July  n,  1836,  he  ordered  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury  to  publish  the  Specie  Circular,  forbidding  the  land 

1  The  most  interesting  of  these  propositions,  in  view  of  the  future  development 
of  industry,  was  made  by  Felix  Grundy  of  Tennessee,  at  the  suggestion  of  Presi- 
dent Jackson  himself ;  namely,  that  the  surplus  be  used  to  buy  the  "  freedom  of 
the  railroads."  As  roads  or  sections  of  roads  were  completed,  a  sum  fixed  by  law 
should  be  paid  them  by  the  government,  in  return  for  which  the  roads  were  to 
transport  mail,  troops,  and  property  of  the  government  free  of  charge.  Such  an 
arrangement  would  have  been  a  long  step  in  the  direction  of  government  owner- 
ship. The  contract  was  to  be  perpetual,  and  the  payments  were  to  constitute  a 
lien  on  the  property  and  land  of  the  roads. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  393 

agents  and  the  deposit  banks  to  receive  anything  but  gold  and 
silver  after  August  15  in  payment  for  the  sales  of  public  land. 
Thus  by  a  stroke  of  the  pen  the  government  deprived  of  their 
validity  as  national  currency  that  vast  mass  of  state  bank  notes 
which  the  deposit  banks  had  been  freely  receiving  in  payment 
for  public  lands  and  reissuing  as  loans  for  the  purchase  of  more 
lands — an  endless  chain.  The  deposit  banks  of  the  West  began 
to  call  desperately  on  the  East  for  specie  to  meet  their  obliga- 
tions to  the  government,  and  at  the  same  time  shut  down 
rigorously  on  their  loans.  The  land  sales  virtually  ceased.  The 
" wildcat  banks,"  without  specie  to  redeem  their  discredited 
notes,  collapsed. 

Had  the  Specie  Circular  been  issued  six  months  earlier,  the 
panic  which  followed  would  probably  have  come  in  time  to  sweep 
the  administration  out  of  office.  But  the  campaign  of  1836 
was  already  far  advanced,  and  the  election  took  place  before 
the  effects  of  Jackson's  fateful  circular  were  fully  felt.  The 
National  Democratic  Convention,  which  met  at  Baltimore  in 
May,  had  unanimously  indorsed  Jackson's  candidate,  Van 
Buren.  The  Whigs,  not  yet  amalgamated  into  a  party,  held  no 
convention  and  published  no  platform.  They  depended  on  the 
combination  of  votes  given  to  various  anti-Jackson  candidates 
(Daniel  Webster  in  New  England,  Hugh  L.  White  in  the  South 
and  Southwest,  William  H.  Harrison  in  the  Middle  and  Western 
States)  to  prevent  Van  Buren  from  getting  a  majority  in  the 
Electoral  College,  thus  throwing  the  election  into  the  House  of" 
Representatives.  But  although  Van  Buren  had  little  to  recom- 
mend him  for  the  first  office  in  the  land,  the  influence  of  his 
great  chief  was  powerful  enough  to  carry  him  to  victory,  with 
170  electoral  votes  against  124  for  all  his  opponents  combined. 
His  popular  majority,  however,  was  but  25,000,  as  compared 
with  Jackson's  157,000  in  1832. x  After  enjoying  the  peculiar 
satisfaction  on  inauguration  day  of  seeing  Van  Buren,  whom  the 

1  Jackson's  candidate  for  the  vice  presidency,  Richard  M.  Johnson  of  Ken- 
tucky, failed  by  a  single  vote  of  getting  a  majority  in  the  Electoral  College.  For 
the  first  and  only  time  in  our  history  the  choice  of  a  vice  president  then  devolved 
upon  the  Senate,  which  immediately  elected  Johnson. 


394  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Senate  had  refused  to  confirm  as  minister  to  England,  sworn 
into  the  presidency  by  Chief  Justice  Taney,  whom  the  Senate 
had  refused  to  confirm  as  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  Jackson 
issued  a  farewell  address  to  the  people  of  America  and  departed 
from  Washington  for  his  plantation  in  Tennessee,  leaving  Van 
Buren  pledged  to  "follow  in  the  footsteps  of  my  illustrious 
predecessor,"  but  destined  to  walk  a  path  strewn  with  thorns. 
The  new  president  was  hardly  installed  in  office  before  the 
country  was  in  the  throes  of  the  worst  panic  in  its  history — 
the  inevitable  nemesis  of  overspeculation,  inflation,  reckless 
banking,  and  frenzied  schemes  of  canal  and  railroad  develop- 
ment. One  misfortune  pressed  upon  another's  heels.  A  busi- 
ness depression  in  England  cut  down  our  exports  sharply. 
The  price  of  cotton  fell  from  twenty  to  ten  cents  a  pound, 
forcing  some  of  our  largest  planters  into  bankruptcy.  The 
British  capitalists  who  had  invested  generously  in  American 
securities  in  the  hour  of  our  seeming  great  prosperity  called  on 
our  banks  for  money  just  at  the  moment  when  they  were  beset 
with  importunities  for  specie  to  satisfy  the  demands  of  Jack- 
son's Circular  and  crippled  by  the  withdrawal  of  government 
funds  to  pay  the  first  installment  of  the  distribution  of  the  sur- 
plus. The  strain  was  too  great.  In  May  the  banks  of  New 
York  suspended  specie  payment,  and  by  the  end  of  the  summer 
there  was  not  a  single  bank  in  the  United  States  that  met  its 
obligations  in  gold  and  silver.  Specie  was  hoarded.  Interest 
'rates  rose  to  3  per  cent  a  month.  Building-operations,  indus- 
trial expansion,  improvement  schemes, — in  short,  every  activity 
that  depended  on  the  extension  of  credit, — ceased.  Thousands 
of  men  were  thrown  out  of  employment.  By  September,  1837, 
nine  tenths  of  the  factories  of  the  Eastern  states  were  closed. 
The  cruelty  of  nature  was  added  to  the  folly  of  man  to  make 
the  disaster  complete.  In  the  summer  and  autumn  of  1836  the 
Hessian  fly  ravaged  the  wheat  fields  of  Pennsylvania,  Delaware, 
Virginia,  Tennessee,  and  Kentucky.  The  citizens  of  Louisville 
declared  in  a  memorial  to  the  Senate  that  their  prosperity  was 
"as  completely  marred  as  if  a  large  invading  army  had  passed 
through  their  country."  Flour  rose  to  $i 2  a  barrel.  The  scanty 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  395 

wages  of  the  masses  of  laborers  in  our  great  cities  were  literally 
insufficient  to  buy  them  bread.  The  walls  of  New  York  were 
placarded  with  angry  handbills:  "Bread,  Meat,  Rent,  Fuel — 
the  prices  must  come  down ! "  Starving  mobs  broke  into  the 
warehouses  where  the  precious  flour  was  stored  and  threw  the 
barrels  into  the  street. 

The  panic,  of  course,  was  not  due  to  any  one  man  or  measure. 
However,  the  people  at  large,  incompetent  and  impatient  to  seek 
the  underlying  causes  of  economic  distress,  threw  the  blame  on 
Van  Buren.  And  the  Whigs  were  quick  to  exploit  the  misfortune 
for  the  discredit  of  the  Democratic  administration :  the  trouble 
was  all  due  to  Jackson's  crimes  and  blunders — his  defeat  of 
the  Bank  charter,  his  removal  of  the  deposits,  his  crusade 
against  paper  money,  his  Specie  Circular.  In  the  widespread 
popular  distress  the  Whigs  had  their  best  campaign  material. 
They  carried  several  important  states  in  the  elections  of  1838, 
including  New  York,  where  the  brilliant  young  William  H. 
Seward  won  the  governorship  over  Marcy  and  the  "Albany 
Regency." 

Meanwhile  Van  Buren  had  called  Congress  in  extra  session 
for  the  first  Monday  in  September,  1837,  to  relieve  the  embar- 
rassed condition  of  the  Treasury  and  restore  financial  con- 
fidence in  the  country.  The  distribution  of  the  installment  of 
the  surplus  due  in  October  was  postponed  until  183 p.1  Treas- 
ury notes  to  the  amount  of  $10,000,000  were  issued  to  meet 
the  government  expenses.  The  Whigs  demanded  the  reestablish- 
ment  of  the  National  Bank  and  the  repeal  of  the  Specie  Cir- 
cular, but  Van  Buren  remained  firm  in  his  adhesion  to  Jackson's 
policies.  The  scheme  of  depositing  the  government  balances  in 
the  "pet  banks"  having  signally  failed,  the  President  devised 
a  new  plan,  which  divorced  the  government  finances  completely 
from  any  banking  system.  This  was  the  Independent  Treasury, 
commonly  called  the  Subtreasury,  plan,  by  which  the  public 

iWhen  the  year  1839  arrived,  the  government  had  a  deficit  and  not  a  surplus; 
so  the  Distribution  Bill  lapsed,  after  about  $28,000,000  had  been  deposited  with 
the  states.  The  money  was  never  recalled,  although  it  continued  to  stand  on 
the  Treasury  books  as  funds  of  the  United  States. 


3Q6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

funds  were  to  remain  in  the  hands  of  government  custodians — 
postmasters,  directors  of  mints,  collectors  of  customs — until 
called  for.  Van  Buren  labored  for  two  years  with  refractory 
elements  in  Congress  to  get  the  Independent  Treasury  bill 
passed.  The  Whigs,  who  saw  in  it  the  doom  of  their  hopes  for 
a  National  Bank,  and  conservative  Eastern  Democrats,  who  be- 
lieved that  the  government  should  help  the  banks  out  of  their 
difficulty  instead  of  abandoning  them  in  the  hour  of  their  need, 
combined  to  block  the  measure  in  the  House.  On  the  other 
hand,  Calhoun,  to  the  amazement  of  his  colleagues  in  the 
Senate,  brought  the  immense  weight  of  his  influence  in  the  South 
to  the  support  of  the  administration  (expecting  in  return  Van 
Buren's  favor  for  the  annexation  of  slave  territory  in  Texas). 
Jackson  wrote  an  open  letter  from  the  Hermitage  commending 
the  new  plan.  The  bill  was  finally  passed,  June  30,  1840.  It 
provided  for  the  establishment  of  subtreasuries  in  important 
cities  of  the  country  (Boston,  New  York,  Philadelphia,  St. 
Louis,  New  Orleans),  where  the  public  moneys  were  to  be  kept 
in  vaults.1 

The  financial  situation  was  the  absorbing  question  of  Van 
Buren's  term.  It  furnished  the  Whigs  the  chief  rallying  point 
for  opposition  to  the  administration  and  for  the  consolidation 
of  their  party.  Still,  there  were  other  subjects  of  importance 
with  which  Van  Buren  had  to  deal.  In  November,  1837, 
a  serious  revolt  against  English  rule  broke  out  in  Canada. 
The  insurgents  appealed  to  the  Americans  along  the  border 
to  help  them,  holding  out  offers  of  annexation  to  the  United 
States  if  the  revolution  proved  successful.  The  memory  of 
our  two  wars  with  England  had  left  a  heritage  of  hostility 
toward  the  "mother  country,"  which  was  increased  by  the 
large  Irish  immigration.  Meetings  were  held  in  Burlington, 
St.  Albans,  Rochester,  Buffalo,  and  many  other  towns  in 

lfrhe  momentary  triumph  of  the  Whigs  in  the  election  of  1840  led  to  the  re- 
peal of  the  Independent  Treasury  Act;  but  it  was  repassed  in  1846,  after  the 
Democrats  had  regained  control,  and  it  remained  in  force  until  the  Civil  War, 
when  our  government,  under  the  stress  of  enormous  expenses,  was  obliged  again 
to  have  recourse  to  the  powerful  banking  interests  of  the  country. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  397 

Vermont  and  New  York,  at  which  resolutions  of  sympathy  with 
the  insurgents  were  adopted,  money  was  raised,  and  food,  cloth- 
ing and  ammunition  were  collected.  Volunteer  companies  even 
were  enlisted.  Van  Buren's  Secretary  of  State,  John  Forsythe, 
warned  the  governors  of  the  two  border  states  to  enforce 
a  strict  neutrality,  but  the  recruiting  still  went  on.  Several 
hundred  Americans  joined  the  banners  of  the  rebel  leader 
Mackenzie  at  Navy  Island  in  the  Niagara  River.  A  small 
American  vessel,  the  Caroline,  was  used  to  transport  men  and 
supplies  to  the  insurgents.  In  the  darkness  of  the  night  of 
December  29,  1837,  a  detachment  of  English  soldiers  rowed  to 
the  Caroline  as  she  was  moored  to  her  dock  on  the  American 
side  of  the  river,  drove  the  men  off  her  decks,  with  several  killed 
and  wounded,  and  sent  her  drifting  ablaze  over  the  falls.  The 
whole  border  was  instantly  roused  to  reprisals.  Expeditions 
for  the  invasion  of  Canada  were  launched  from  Detroit  and 
Ogdensburg.  The  President  sent  General  Scott  to  the  scene  of 
the  disorders,  with  a  message  to  the  governors  of  Vermont  and 
New  York  to  call  out  the  militia,  both  to  restrain  the  hot-heads 
and  to  protect  American  soil.  The  excitement  died  down  with 
the  defeat  of  the  insurgents.  Conciliatory  diplomacy  prevented 
a  breach  with  England.  But  the  enemies  of  Van  Buren  charged 
him  with  cowardice  and  truckling  to  Great  Britain  in  allowing 
the  " murder"  of  American  citizens  on  American  soil. 

During  the  whole  of  the  administration,  Congress  and  the 
country  were  increasingly  disturbed  by  the  abolitionist  agi- 
tation. The  President  had  declared  himself  in  his  inaugural 
address  "the  inflexible  and  uncompromising  opponent  of  ev- 
ery attempt  in  Congress  to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of 
Columbia  against  the  wishes  of  the  slaveholding  states."  But 
all  to  no  avail.  Petitions  were  multiplied,  the  gag-rule  was 
reenacted,  John  Quincy  Adams  repeated  his  defiance,  the  de- 
bates in  the  House  and  Senate  grew  angrier.  Lawless  bands 
sacked  and  burned  negro  quarters  in  the  cities,  lynchings  in- 
creased, and  Elijah  Love  joy  was  shot  down  in  Alton,  Illinois, 
while  defending  his  abolitionist  press  against  the  rioters.  The 
movement  for  the  annexation  of  Texas  (which  we  shall  study  in 


398  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  next  chapter)  gave  a  great  impetus  to  the  abolitionist  cause. 
Resolutions  against  annexation  were  passed  by  the  legislatures 
of  state  after  state  in  the  North.  The  antislavery  congressmen 
made  the  issue  the  topic  for  scathing  denunciations  of  the 
institution,  which  provoked  angry  replies  from  the  South. 

Abolitionism  was  no  doctrine  of  the  Whigs.  Clay  and  Webster 
professed  as  much  horror  of  it  as  Calhoun  and  Benton.  Yet 
there  is  no  doubt  that  the  antislavery  sentiment  in  the  North, 
of  which  abolitionism  was  the  militant  advance  guard,  found 
a  growing  measure  of  sympathy  in  the  Whig  party.  The  Demo- 
crats, especially  after  Calhoun  came  to  the  support  of  the  ad- 
ministration, tended  more  and  more  to  become  the  party  of 
the  South.  It  took  several  years,  to  be  sure,  for  the  demands 
of  the  slave  interests  to  wear  down  all  other  issues  in  the  South 
and  eliminate  the  Whig  party  there,  but  the  tendency  is  already 
to  be  detected  in  the  slavery  debates  of  Van  Buren's  Congresses. 
One  has  only  to  compare  the  resolutions  offered  in  the  Senate 
by  Calhoun  and  Clay  on  the  subject  of  the  petitions  in  1837. 
Calhoun  declared  that  the  fanaticism  of  the  North  must  be 
crushed  "without  temporizing  or  conciliation,"  else  it  would 
destroy  the  Union.  Domestic  slavery  was  an  institution  of  the 
South,  recognized  by  the  Constitution,  and  "no  change  of  feel- 
ing on  the  part  of  the  other  states  could  justify  them  or  their 
citizens  in  open  and  systematic  attacks  thereon  with  a  view  to 
its  overthrow,  or  in  denying  to  the  South  the  advantage  which 
would  accrue  to  her  from  the  annexation  of  new  states  or  ter- 
ritory on  the  ground  that  the  institution  of  slavery  which 
would  be  extended  into  them  was  sinful  or  immoral."  Clay,  on 
the  other  hand,  professed  that  he  had  no  such  gloomy  fears  for 
the  endurance  of  the  Union.  The  best  way  to  check  the  fa- 
naticism of  the  abolitionists  was  to  continue  to  receive  their 
petitions  and  refer  them  to  the  proper  committee,  where  they 
would  die  a  natural  death.  Clay  offered  counter  resolutions 
to  Calhoun's,  condemning  interference  with  slavery,  but  still 
pledging  the  Senate  "to  receive  and  respectfully  treat  any 
petitions,  couched  in  decorous  language,  presented  by  citizens 
of  the  United  States,  touching  slavery  in  the  District  of 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  399 

Columbia."  As  to  the  territory  of  Florida  (the  only  one  in 
which  slavery  existed  at  the  time),  he  regarded  the  abolition  of 
slavery  there  as  " highly  inexpedient,"  because,  among  other 
reasons,  "the  people  of  the  territory  had  not  asked  for  abolition," 
and,  when  the  territory  should  be  admitted  as  a  state  into  the 
Union,  "the  people  would  be  entitled  to  decide  that  question  for 
themselves."  Clay  did  not  refer  to  Texas  in  his  resolutions.  As 
between  the  militant  and  uncompromising  language  of  Calhoun 
and  the  provisos  and  loopholes  in  Clay's  resolutions,  it  is  not 
hard  to  see  where  the  antislavery  men  would  find  the  more 
comfort. 

The  chief  point  on  which  the  Whig  leaders  waged  their  four 
years'  campaign  against  the  Jackson-Van  Buren  Democracy 
was  the  financial  and  industrial  disorder  which  they  claimed 
had  been  brought  upon  the  country  by  the  incompetency  and 
arrogance  of  the  administration.  Adams  protested  against  the 
"crimes"  of  ignorant  and  corrupt  officials  in  all  departments 
of  the  government;  Webster  thundered  against  the  cowardice 
and  demagogism  of  the  party  in  power,  in  abandoning  the  solid 
business  and  banking  interests  of  the  country ;  Clay  toured  the 
Eastern  states,  thanking  God  that  he  "had  been  spared  to  help 
in  undoing  the  work  of  Andrew  Jackson."  A  national  Whig 
convention  met  at  Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania,  early  in  December, 
1839.  Henry  Clay  was  by  far  the  most  prominent  man  in  the 
party,  its  founder  and  creator.  He  was  also  the  personal  choice 
of  the  great  majority  of  the  delegates.  But  Clay  was  a  Free- 
mason, a  slaveholder,  and  a  high  protectionist.  On  each  of  these 
counts  he  would  have  lost  votes.  His  very  prominence  was  a 
bar  to  his  availability.  Former  Jackson  men  might  be  de- 
tached from  Van  Buren,  but  they  would  never  support  the  old 
hero's  archenemy.  To  Clay's  bitter  disappointment,  and  some- 
what to  his  disgust,  the  convention  nominated  William  H.  Har- 
rison, the  hero  of  Tippecanoe,  who  had  polled  73  votes  in  the 
election  of  1836  and  could  show  a  creditable  record  of  nearly 
fifty  years  of  public  service  as  a  soldier  on  the  northwest  border, 
governor  of  the  Northwest  Territory,  representative  and  senator 
in  the  national  Congress,  and  our  first  minister  to  the  Republic 


400  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  Colombia.  John  Tyler  of  Virginia  was  named  for  vice  pres- 
ident, simply  to  gain  votes  for  the  ticket  in  the  South — for 
Tyler  was  a  states'-rights  man,  an  anti-Bank  man,  and  a  low- 
tariff  man,  whose  only  bond  of  sympathy  with  the  Whigs  was 
hatred  for  Andrew  Jackson.  The  convention  published  no  plat- 
form, for  the  heterogeneous  elements  composing  the  party  could 
unite  on  no  common  purpose  beyond  the  cry,  "Down  with  Van 
Buren ! "  Harrison  was  known,  however,  to  be  a  believer  in 
banks,  a  credit  system,  paper  currency,  and  reform  of  the  civil 
service.  Campaign  orators  like  Clay,  Webster,  Corwin,  Crit- 
tenden,  Wise,  and  Prentiss  gave  the  voters  of  the  different  sec- 
tions of  the  country  to  understand  that  if  the  Whig  party  should 
be  successful  at  the  polls  it  would  mean  the  satisfaction  of 
the  particular  interests  and  desires  of  the  audience  they  were 
addressing. 

A  friend  of  Clay's  was  overheard  by  the  correspondent  of  a 
Democratic  paper  in  Baltimore  to  express  his  disappointment 
at  Harrison's  nomination  by  the  sneer:  "Give  him  a  barrel  of 
hard  cider,  settle  a  pension  of  $2000  a  year  on  him,  and,  my 
word  for  it,  he  will  sit  for  the  remainder  of  his  days  in  his 
log  cabin  by  the  side  of  a  sea-coal  fire,  studying  moral  philoso- 
phy." The  paper  published  the  remark  as  a  campaign  document 
against  the  Whigs,  but  it  proved  to  be  a  boomerang.  The  Whigs 
seized  upon  this  testimony  to  the  simple  tastes  and  virtuous 
poverty  of  their  candidate  (though,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  Har- 
rison lived  in  very  comfortable  circumstances  on  a  2ooo-acre 
farm  on  the  banks  of  the  Ohio).  They  adopted  the  log  cabin 
and  cider  barrel  as  emblems  of  the  campaign.  Their  candidate 
was  the  unspoiled  son  of  the  soil,  the  Cincinnatus  who  had  left 
his  plow  to  take  the  sword  and  had  laid  down  the  victorious 
sword  to  take  the  plow  again.  He  represented  the  homely 
republican  virtues  of  a  true  American,  while  Van  Buren,  in- 
stalled in  his  luxurious  "bachelor"  quarters  in  the  White  House, 
ate  his  dainty  French  fare  off  golden  plates  and  drank  costly 
wines  out  of^  silver  goblets,  callous  to  the  sufferings  which  his 
ignorance  and  the  corruption  of  his  officials  were  bringing  on 
the  country. 


"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON"  401 

The  Whig  campaign  was  a  continuous  festival  of  oratory, 
pageant,  song,  and  shouting,  in  which  the  sober  remonstrances 
of  the  Democrats  and  their  appeals  to  argue  the  merits  of  the 
Bank,  the  currency,  states'  rights,  and  taxation  were  drowned. 
Log  cabins  were  erected  for  Whig  headquarters,  with  the  coon- 
skin  nailed  to  the  wall  and  the  latchstring  hung  out.  Mass  meet- 
ings were  gathered  around  the  cider  barrel.  Huge  balls  were 
rolled  through  the  streets  from  town  to  town  by  hundreds  of 
men  and  boys  shouting  the  songs  of  "Tippecanoe  and  Tyler 
too"  and  "Van,  Van,  is  a  used-up  man."  Never  before  nor  since 
was  there  such  a  campaign  of  vociferation.  The  Democrats,  as 
one  of  their  papers  scornfully  remarked,  "were  sung  down,  lied 
down,  drunk  down."  Nearly  double  the  nimiber  of  the  voters 
of  the  previous  election  were  brought  out  to  the  polls,  and, 
when  the  balloting  was  over,  Harrison  had  carried  all  but  seven 
states  of  the  Union.  His  electoral  vote  was  234  to  60  for  Van 
Buren.  The  Whigs  got  control  of  both  Houses  of  Congress. 
In  the  excitement  of  the  campaign  the  appearance  of  a  new 
political  party,  which  polled  7000  votes,  passed  almost  unno- 
ticed. But  the  Liberty  party,  which  was  quietly  launched  by 
delegates  froni  six  states  meeting  at  Albany  on  the  first  of  April, 
1840,  was  destined  to  grow  through  a  score  of  years  into  the 
mighty  force  which  shattered  the  Whig  party  into  fragments 
and  sent  the  Democrats  down  to  a  long  defeat. 

The  Whig  triumph  of  1840  marks  the  end  of  the  Jacksonian 
era.  That  era  had  been  ushered  in  by  the  overwhelming  victory 
of  a  soldier  hero,  a  representative  of  the  great  new  West,  stand- 
ing as  the  champion  of  the  people  against  the  usurpation  of  their 
power  by  an  aristocratic  government  at  Washington  indifferent 
to  their  needs  and  impervious  to  their  demands.  It  was  ended 
by  exactly  another  such  victory.  And  had  the  Whigs  been 
destined  to  enjoy  a  dozen  years  of  unbroken  supremacy,  it  is 
likely  that  they  too  would  have  been  confronted  at  the  end  of 
that  period  by  a  new  and  clamorous  "democratic"  movement 
protesting  against  the  stagnation  and  corruption  of  our  govern- 
ment. For  it  is  in  the  nature  of  a  young  and  vigorous  de- 
mocracy to  engender  demands  for  the  reform  and  readjustment 


402  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  governmental  machinery  more  rapidly  than  any  actually 
working  machinery  can  meet  those  demands.  The  Jacksonian 
era,  roughly  corresponding  to  the  fourth  decade  of  the  last  cen- 
tury, was  perhaps  the  period  of  all  our  history  most  fruitful  in 
democratic  innovations,  with  its  enlargement  of  the  suffrage,  its 
extension  of  elective  offices,  its  revised  state  constitutions, 
its  national  nominating  conventions,  its  organization  of  labor, 
its  popular  discussion — on  the  lyceum  platform,  in  the  pulpit, 
and  especially  in  the  multiplying  sheets  of  a  cheap  press — of 
such  burning  issues  of  the  day  as  abolition,  immigration,  the 
annexation  of  Texas,  and  the  settlement  of  Oregon.  It  was  the 
era  of  the  introduction  of  steam  locomotion  and  of  humanitarian 
reform  in  debtors'  laws  and  the  keeping  of  jails  and  asylums,  in 
the  curricula  of  the  schools,  in  the  encouragement  of  temper- 
ance, and  in  a  hundred  other  matters  to  which  economic  and 
social  histories  of  the  period  would  give  a  more  extended  notice 
than  is  possible  for  this  more  strictly  political  narrative  to  do. 
Andrew  Jackson  incarnated  the  spirit  of  the  new  democracy. 
He  personified  and  dominated  the  developing  political  forces 
of  the  fourth  decade  of  the  century,  as  Thomas  Jefferson  had 
dominated  and  personified  those  of  the  first  decade.  Paradox- 
ical as  it  may  seem,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  Jackson  him- 
self contributed  more  than  any  other  man  to  the  overthrow  of 
the  Jacksonian  democracy.  For  he  taught  the  masses  of  the 
people  to  hold  their  governors  subject  to  their  will,  and  educated 
them  to  view  as  reactionary  any  regime  that  tended  to  separate 
itself  from  the  censure  of  public  opinion  or  paused  in  the  culti- 
vation of  popular  approbation.  He  saw  the  Whig  leaders  seize 
the  very  weapons  in  their  campaign  against  Van  Bur  en  which  he 
himself  had  used  in  his  campaign  against  John  Quincy  Adams  a 
dozen  years  earlier.  The  rolling  log  cabins  and  the  cider  barrels, 
the  mass  meetings  and  the  boisterous  songs,  must  have  been 
pathetically  reminiscent  of  hickory  poles  and  stamped  waist- 
coats and  huzzas  for  New  Orleans  and  Pensacola  to  the  old  hero, 
now  well  past  his  threescore  and  ten  years,  who  was  following 
the  fortunes  of  his  party  with  undiminished  interest  from  his 
"retreat  at  the  Hermitage. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC 

Our  confederacy  must  be  viewed  as  the  nest  from  which  all  America  north 
and  south  is  to  be  peopled. — THOMAS  JEFFERSON 

TYLER  AND  TEXAS 

The  rejoicing  of  the  Whigs  was  soon  turned  to  mourning. 
Five  weeks  after  the  old  hero  of  Tippecanoe  had  spoken  his 
inaugural  address  before  the  enthusiastic  crowd  gathered  at  the 
eastern  front  of  the  Capitol,  his  body  was  lying  in  state  beneath 
its  majestic  dome.  How  far  Harrison  would  have  succeeded, 
had  he  lived,  in  controlling  and  guiding  the  Whigs  is  a  matter 
of  conjecture.  He  was  not,  like  Jackson  in  1828  and  Jefferson 
in  1800,  the  acknowledged  leader  and  builder  of  the  party  which 
had  won  the  nation's  indorsement  at  the  polls.  Both  Clay  and 
Webster  towered  far  above  him,  and  although  they  yielded  him 
the  place  at  the  head  of  the  ticket  as  the  most  "available" 
candidate,  they  made  slight  concealment  of  their  opinion  of  his 
"mediocrity."  They  meant  to  use  the  old  general  as  the  im- 
posing figurehead  at  the  bow  of  the  ship  of  state,  while  they 
themselves  manned  the  bridge  and  piped  the  crew.  Clay  de- 
clined a  place  in  the  cabinet,  preferring  to  direct  the  adminis- 
tration from  his  seat  in  the  Senate;  but  a  full  half  of  the 
cabinet  offices  were  filled  with  men  of  his  recommendation — 
Ewing  (Treasury),  Badger  (Navy),  and  Crittenden  (Attorney- 
General).  Webster,  given  the  choice  of  positions  after  Clay's 
declination,  took  the  portfolio  of  State,  and  brought  his  follower 
Francis  Granger  into  the  cabinet  as  Postmaster-General.  The 
President  appears  to  have  been  allowed  to  select  his  Secretary 
of  War  (James  K.  Bell)  without  the  interference  of  the  giants. 
Clay  had  decided  in  party  caucus  some  time  before  the  inaugu- 
ration that  the  new  Whig  Congress  must  be  called  in  extra 

403 


404  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

session  to  bring  the  blessings  of  the  victory  of  1840  to  the 
country  without  delay,  and  Harrison  had  duly  issued  the  call 
for  the  session  to  meet  on  May  31,  1841.  The*  Whig  leaders 
had  refused  to  let  Harrison  open  his  mouth  as  candidate.  They 
would  now  run  the  government  for  him,  as  they  had  run 
the  campaign — successfully;  if  he  would  only  remain  in  the 
background. 

Harrison's  death  in  no  wise  changed  the  plans  of  the  Whig 
leaders,  nor  did  the  accession  of  Vice  President  Tyler  seem  at 
first  to  bode  any  ill  to  those  plans.  In  an  address  to  the  people, 
published  immediately  after  Harrison's  funeral,  Tyler  spoke 
hopefully  of  the  reforms  to  be  introduced  and  modestly  of  his 
own  readiness  to  follow  Congress  in  any  constitutional  measures. 
His  message  at  the  opening  of  the  extra  session  of  Congress 
(June  i)  was  almost  deferential  in  its  recognition  of  the  right 
of  the  representatives  fresh  from  their  constituents  to  inaugu- 
rate the  needed  reforms  for  the  relief  of  the  Treasury  and  the 
improvement  of  the  currency.  His  remarks  on  "a  necessary 
financial  agent"  for  dealing  with  the  public  funds  were  inter- 
preted by  Benton  as  so  unmistakably  a  recommendation  for  the 
reestablishment  of  the  National  Bank  that  the  old  Jackso- 
nian  forthwith  began  an  attack  on  the  President  in  the  Senate. 
"The  people,  simple  folk,"  says  Schouler,  " imagined  that  Tyler 
would  follow  Harrison's  plans  with  the  same  sad  reverence  with 
which  he  had  followed  his  hearse." 

The  plans,  however,  were  not  Harrison's  but  Clay's.  On 
June  7 'Clay  introduced  into  the  Senate  an  elaborate  program 
consisting  of  six  resolutions,  which  were  nothing  less  than  the 
whole  plan  and  policy  of  the  Whig  administration.  They  were 
in  reality  the  platform  of  the  party,  which  the  leaders  had  not 
dared  to  publish  before  the  election,  but  which  they  expected 
now,  with  their  president  in  the  White  House  and  with  a 
majority  in  both  branches  of  Congress,  to  pass  without  diffi- 
culty. That  it  was  the  president's  constitutional  privilege  to 
recommend  legislation  to  Congress  seems  not  to  have  troubled 
the  senator  from  Kentucky.  What  the  president's  part  was  to 
be  in  this  administration  we  have  already  seen.  The  days  of 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  405 

executive  domination  were  over.  The  good  old  Whig  doctrine 
of  the  rule  of  the  enlightened  aristocracy  was  to  take  the  place 
of  the  Jacksonian  demagogism  of  "Democracy,"  which  af- 
fected to  rest  its  absolute  and  arbitrary  acts  on  the  will  of  the 
whole  people. 

Clay's  resolutions  contained  three  main  projects:  first,  the 
reestablishment  of  a  National  Bank,  with  the  preliminary  step 
of  the  abolition  of  the  Independent  Treasury  system ;  secondly, 
the  revision  of  the  tariff  to  yield  an  adequate  revenue;  and, 
thirdly,  the  allotment  to  the  several  states  of  the  proceeds  of  the 
sale  of  the  public  lands  within  their  borders.  These  resolutions 
were  virtually  the  revival  of  the  old  National  Republican  policy 
of  the  Adams-Clay  days;  namely,  National  Bank,  protective 
tariff,  and  internal  improvements.  It  is  true  that  the  last  two 
objects  were  not  mentioned  in  Clay's  resolutions,  but  one  can 
see  how  skillfully  they  are  included  in  his  demands.  For  if  the 
tariff  were  raised  high  enough  to  provide  an  "adequate  revenue" 
at  the  same  time  that  the  only  other  great  item  of  revenue,  the 
public-lands  sales,  was  made  over  to  the  states,  then  the  tariff 
would  be  high  enough  to  be  protective.  And  if  the  government 
gave  the  states  the  proceeds  of  the  public-lands  sales  to  spend 
on  their  own  internal  improvements,  it  would  come  to  the  same 
thing  as  the  government's  spending  the  money  itself.  In  either 
case  it  would  be  national  money  devoted  to  local  improvements. 

At  first  all  went  well.  The  bill  for  the  abolition  of  the 
Independent  Treasury  was  passed  and  promptly  signed  by  the 
President.  Then  came  the  crucial  measure  of  the  Congress — 
the  reestablishment  of  the  Bank.  It  was  known  that  Tyler 
was  a  strong  states'-rights  man  and  that  some  care  would  have 
to  be  taken  to  draft  a  bill  which  would  meet  with  his  approval. 
The  point  on  which  Tyler  was  insistent  was  the  necessity  of 
gaining  the  consent  of  the  states  for  establishing  branches 
within  their  borders.  The  House  was  apparently  willing  to 
yield  this  point,  but  Clay  swept  it  aside  in  the  Senate.  A 
National  Bank  would  not  be  "national,"  he  maintained,  if  it 
had  to  ask  the  consent  of  the  states  anywhere  to  do  business. 
The  question  of  its  constitutionality  had  been  settled  once  for 


406  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

all  by  Marshall's  great  decision,  and  the  people  had  reversed 
their  condemnation  of  the  Bank  in  the  election  of  1832  by  this 
new  election  of  1840.  John  Tyler  could  do  no  better  than  fol- 
low his  illustrious  fellow  Virginian,  James  Madison,  whom  he 
professed  to  reverence,  and  sign  the  bill  for  the  Bank's  charter. 
The  utmost  that  Clay  would  concede  was  the  power  of  a  state  to 
prevent  the  establishment  of  a  branch  by  an  express  act  of  its 
legislature. 

The  Bank  bill  was  passed  by  votes  of  128  to  97  in  the  House 
and  26  to  23  in  the  Senate  and  was  sent  to  the  President  on 
August  6.  Tyler  kept  the  bill  until  the  last  moment  of  the  ten 
days  allowed  him  for  deliberation,  and  then  returned  it  with  his 
veto.  The  narrowness  of  the  Whig  majority  in  the  Senate  made 
the  passage  of  the  bill  over  his  veto  impossible.  Another  at- 
tempt was  made  to  frame  a  bill  which  would  meet  with  the 
executive's  approval.  Two  leading  Whig  congressmen  conferred 
with  Secretaries  Webster  and  Ewing  in  preparing  the  new  bill, 
which,  according  to  Swing's  testimony,  fulfilled  the  conditions 
which  Tyler  demanded.  Even  the  name  "Bank"  was  not  used. 
The  new  institution  was  to  be  called  a  "fiscal  corporation,"  and 
the  "agencies"  (not  "branches")  in  the  states  were  to  be  de- 
prived of  their  banking-functions  of  loan  and  discount.  Yet  to 
the  amazement  and  disgust  of  the  Whig  leaders  Tyler  vetoed 
this  second  bill  also  (September  9). 

It  was  evident  that  Tyler  would  have  no  National  Bank  of 
any  kind.  At  Clay's  behest  Crittenden,  Ewing,  Badger,  and  Bell 
immediately  resigned  from  the  cabinet,  and  Granger  soon  fol- 
lowed, leaving  only  Daniel  Webster  of  the  original  Harrison 
appointees.  The  extra  session,  which  had  begun  with  such  prom- 
ise in  June,  ended  disastrously  in  September.  The  chief  measure 
of  the  Whigs  had  been  defeated  by  this  "president  by  acci- 
dent," this  Virginian  of  states'-rights  convictions,  whom  they 
had  had  no  more  intention  of  putting  in  the  White  House  than 
they  had  of  putting  on  the  throne  of  China.  The  breach  be- 
tween the  executive  and  Congress  was  complete,  and  Tyler  con- 
trolled the  situation  through  the  veto  which  the  Whigs  had  not 
enough  majority  to  override.  With  exasperating  equanimity 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  407 

Tyler  proceeded  to  fill  up  his  cabinet  (not  with  Clay  men  this 
time)  and  was  ready  for  the  resumption  of  hostilities  at  the 
opening  of  the  regular  session  of  Congress.  The  country  was 
sadly  in  need  of  revenue — the  issue  of  several  millions  of  short- 
time  notes  had  been  necessary  to  meet  the  bare  expenses  of 
government.  The  sudden  reduction  of  the  tariff  which  would 
come  on  January  i,  1842,  according  to  the  scale  arranged  by 
the  compromise  of  1833,  would  leave  the  country  facing  a  huge 
deficit.  Those  reductions  had  been  arranged  nearly  a  decade 
back  and  had  failed  to  take  account  of  the  growth  of  the  coun- 
try and  the  consequent  increase  in  the  expenses  of  the  govern- 
ment. Tyler  urged  Congress  to  make  the  necessary  provision 
by  increasing  the  tariff  rates,  but  he  refused  to  sign  any  bill  that 
did  not  provide  for  the  stoppage  of  the  distribution  of  the  sales 
from  the  public  lands  as  soon  as  the  tariff  should  have  passed 
the  20  per  cent  mark.  In  other  words,  he  would  not  allow  the 
tariff  to  provide  a  surplus  for  internal  improvement.  As  the 
tariff  did  not  drop  below  20  per  cent  at  all,  Clay's  pet  scheme 
was  killed. 

The  Whigs  had  no  alternative  but  to  adopt  the  kind  of  tariff 
bill  Tyler  would  sign  or  let  the  country  suffer.  After  the  Pres- 
ident had  vetoed  two  tariff  bills  and  drawn  upon  himself  the 
threat  of  impeachment,  the  protesting  members  yielded  to  the 
crying  need  of  the  Treasury.  On  August  30,  1.842,  the  House 
passed  the  bill  containing  the  suspension  of  the  distribution  of 
the  land  sales.  John  Tyler  had  ruined  the  plans  of  the  Whigs 
and  brought  the  victory  of  1840  to  naught.  He  was  read  out  of 
the  Whig  party  as  a  " traitor"  and  burned  in  effigy  by  the  crowds 
that  had  shouted  themselves  hoarse  for  him  two  years  before. 
In  a  pathetic  scene  Henry  Clay  resigned  his  seat  in  the  Senate 
(March  31),  to  devote  himself,  as  his  great  rival  Jackson  had 
done  eighteen  years  before,  to  saving  among  the  people  the 
principles  which  were  defeated  at  the  seat  of  government. 

Tyler  has  been  severely  censured  by  our  historians  generally 
for  turning  against  a  party  which  had  elected  him,  and  has  been 
charged  with  the  meanest  of  motives — vanity,  jealousy,  and 
spite.  He  was  filled  with  an  overweening  ambition,  say  his 


408  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

critics,  to  displace  Clay  and  Webster,  over  whom  Harrison's 
providential  removal  had  given  him  the  whip  hand,  and,  relying 
on  a  coterie  of  Virginia  friends  who  "led  him  by  the  nose,"  to 
build  up  a  Tyler  party  devoted  to  the  restoration  of  Virginia's 
influence  in  our  national  councils  and  to  the  extension  of  slavery 
in  the  West.  On  the  other  hand,  his  son,  Professor  Lyon  G. 
Tyler,  produced  in  the  "Letters  and  Times  of  the  Tylers"  (three 
volumes)  an  elaborate  apology  to  prove  that  all  the  public  acts 
of  the  President  were  prompted  by  the  same  lofty  standards 
of  gentlemanly  honor  that  were  acknowledged  in  his  private 
life.  Tyler  was  known  to  be  a  states'-rights  man  and  an  anti- 
Bank  man.  He  was  put  on  the  Whig  ticket  with  the  hope  (vain, 
as  it  proved)  of  carrying  the  state  of  Virginia.  The  Whig 
managers  cared  little  about  Tyler's  views  on  the  Bank,  because 
they  believed  that  as  vice  president  he  would  have  nothing  to 
say  about  the  Bank  or,  indeed,  about  any  matter  of  public 
policy.  As  the  Whigs  published  no  platform,  their  candidates 
were  bound  by  no  promises.  Naturally,  the  support  of  the  head 
of  the  ticket  for  the  program  of  Clay  and  Webster  was  guaran- 
teed, but  was  Tyler,  "who  cared  for  none  of  these  things," 
bound  to  be  converted  to  them  by  the  mere  fact  of  Harrison's 
death?  A  man  cannot  be  a  "traitor"  to  principles  which  he 
has  never  accepted  nor  an  "apostate"  to  a  creed  which  he  has 
never  professed. 

But  to  acquit  Tyler  of  the  charge  of  broken  faith  is  by  no 
means  to  excuse  him  for  his  vanity,  sophistry,  and  obstinacy. 
After  all,  he  allowed  himself  to  be  put  forward  on  the  Whig 
ticket,  knowing  that,  platform  or  no  platform,  the  party  led  by 
Henry  Clay,  if  successful,  would  renew  the  nationalist  doctrines 
of  1824.  If  his  conscience  would  not  let  him  sign  the  Bank  bill, 
even  after  it  had  been  so  amended  as  to  lead  several  members 
of  his  cabinet  to  give  their  written  testimony  that  it  was  satisfac- 
tory to  him,  he  need  not  for  that  have  wrecked  the  party.  By 
holding  either  of  the  bills  for  ten  days  he  could  have  let  it  be- 
come law  without  his  signature,  deferring  to  the  Whig  majority 
in  Congress.  No  man  had  more  bitterly  attacked  Andrew  Jack- 
son's executive  tyranny  in  the  veto  of  bills,  and  yet  he  followed 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  409 

in  Jackson's  footsteps.  Clay's  keen  probe  went  probably  to  the 
right  spot  when  he  accused  Tyler  of  listening  to  the  flattery 
of  his  " corporal's  guard"  of  Virginia  friends  (Wise,  Gilmer, 
Upshur,  Tucker,  Rives),  who  encouraged  him  in  the  belief  that 
he  was  a  national  leader  when  they  were  really  using  him  only 
as  a  sectional  agent  for  the  furtherance  of  states'  rights  and 
slavery.  Even  the  voluminous  work  of  filial  piety  undertaken 
by  his  son  fails  to  show  the  President  as  more  than  an  average 
gentleman  of  fine  breeding,  with  something  of  the  pertinacity 
and  cunning  of  the  politician  in  him  but  little  of  the  strength 
and  vision  of  the  statesman. 

We  have  seen  that  Webster  alone  remained  in  Tyler's  cabinet 
after  the  close  of  the  extra  session.  Among  the  many  motives 
that  may  have  urged  him  to  stay  (ambition  to  retain  office, 
belief  that  he  could  direct  the  policy  of  the  administration, 
unwillingness  to  be  classed  with  Clay's  "underlings")  the 
Massachusetts  statesman  confessed  only  this:  that  there  were 
important  negotiations  with  Great  Britain  pending  and  that 
he  could  not  desert  the  administration  in  such  a  crisis.  This 
reason,  if  not  exhaustive,  was  certainly  sufficient.  Our  relations 
with  England  were  strained  almost  to  the  breaking-point  in 
1841.  British  cruisers  were  stopping  American  ships  off  the 
coast  of  Africa  and  exercising  the  hated  right  of  search  to  guard 
against  the  slave  trade.  The  Caroline  affair  was  not  only  not 
settled  but  it  was  greatly  exaggerated  by  the  threat  of  New  York 
State  to  hang  a  certain  Alexander  McLeod,  a  British  citizen  who 
came  across  the  border  boasting  that  it  was  he  who  had  killed 
the  American  on  board  the  Caroline.  The  lumbermen  of  Maine 
and  New  Brunswick,  disputing  over  the  boundary  line,  had  ac- 
tually precipitated  a  little  war  (the  Aroostook  War),  which  had 
ended  in  a  truce,  leaving  the  boundary  line  still  to  be  adjusted. 
In  the  Far  Northwest  the  Oregon  region,  which  had  been  shared 
in  joint  occupation  by  the  United  States  and  Great  Britain 
according  to  the  treaty  of  1818  (renewed  in  1827),  began  now 
to  be  a  bone  of  contention  between  the  two  powers.  The  English 
resented  the  growing  interest  of  American  explorers  and  mis- 
sionaries in  the  region,  while  the  Americans  complained  of  the 


410  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

steady  encroachments  of  the  Hudson's  Bay  Company  on  the 
southern  portion  of  Oregon,  the  valley  of  the  Columbia,  which 
naturally  formed  the  American  "sphere  of  influence." 

The  South  had  its  grievance,  too,  against  Great  Britain.  The 
brig  Creole  sailed  from  Hampton  Roads  to  New  Orleans  in 
October,  1841,  with  a  cargo  of  one  hundred  and  thirty-eight 
slaves.  The  slaves  mutinied,  killed  their  owner,  overpowered 
the  captain  and  mate,  and  compelled  the  crew  to  land  them  on 
the  British  island  of  Nassau,  where  most  of  them  were  set  at 
liberty  by  the  authorities.  Our  government  demanded  their 
return,  but  the  British  maintained,  in  common  with  the  hated 
abolitionists,  that  once  outside  the  limits  of  the  jurisdiction  of 
a  state  whose  municipal  law  sanctioned  slavery  the  negroes  were 
free  men.  Slavery  had  no  international  standing. 

Finally,  a  number  of  states,  Mississippi  in  the  lead,  hard  hit 
by  the  panic  of  Van  Buren's  administration,  were  actually  re- 
pudiating or  threatening  to  repudiate  their  debts  incurred  in  the 
era  of  overspeculation  which  we  have  studied  in  connection  with 
the  Jacksonian  period.  English  capitalists  had  invested  heavily 
in  these  state  securities  and  were  now  demanding  that  the  na- 
tional government  underwrite  the  state  debts.1  This  accumula- 
tion of  grievances  at  the  beginning  of  Tyler's  administration 
made  peace  with  Great  Britain  more  difficult  to  preserve  than 
at  any  other  time  between  the  Treaty  of  Ghent  and  the  famous 
Trent  affair  in  our  Civil  War.  A  spirited  report  from  the  House 
Committee  on  Foreign  Relations  declared  that  we  would  main- 
tain our  just  rights  in  the  face  of  any  nation  of  the  earth.  Lewis 
Cass,  our  minister  to  France,  wrote  that  the  English  colony  in 
Paris  was  eager  for  war  with  the  United  States.  Measures  were 
actually  taken  by  the  British  cabinet  for  the  dispatch  of  regi- 
ments and  warships  to  Halifax. 

At  this  juncture  Daniel  Webster  performed  a  great  service 
for  his  country.  A  fortunate  change  in  English  politics  in  1841 
brought  Robert  Peel  to  the  premiership  in  the  place  of  Lord 

1John  Quincy  Adams  advised  that  the  federal  government  assume  the  repu- 
diated debt  of  Mississippi  and  eject  the  state  from  the  Union.  There  were  worse 
things  for  many  a  Northern  statesman  in  1840  than  the  disruption  of  the  Union  ! 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  411 

Melbourne,  and  Lord  Aberdeen  to  the  Foreign  Office  in  the 
place  of  Lord  Palmerston.  Peel  and  Aberdeen  were  conciliatory. 
They  sent  to  Washington,  in  the  person  of  Lord  Ashburton,  a 
fair  and  courteous  envoy,  who  knew  and  liked  America.  The 
negotiations  between  Webster  and  Ashburton  in  the  summer 
of  1842  proceeded  smoothly  and  rapidly,  with  the  President's 
willing  aid  at  every  point.  Although  the  Oregon  question  was 
not  debated  and  the  Creole  case  was  postponed  to  drag  its 
weary  settlement  through  a  decade,  all  the  other  points  of  dif- 
ficulty were  solved.  For  the  attack  on  the  Caroline  (McLeod 
being  already  acquitted)  Webster  accepted  Ashburton's  apology 
that  "no  slight  to  the  authority  of  the  United  States  was  ever 
intended."  The  two  nations  agreed  to  a  cruising-convention,  by 
which  each  should  keep  its  patrolling  squadron  on  the  African 
slave  coast,  to  act  together  if  occasion  arose.  The  urgent  ques- 
tion of  the  Maine-New  Brunswick  boundary  was  settled  by  a 
compromise  line  which  gave  about  7000  of  the  12,000  square 
miles  of  disputed  territory  to  the  United  States.  Lord  Ashbur- 
ton promised  that  there  should  be  no  "officious  interference 
with  American  vessels  driven  by  accident  or  violence"  into  the 
ports  of  the  West  Indies  and  took  no  exception  to  Webster's 
declaration  that  the  flag  of  every  regularly  documented  Amer- 
ican merchantman  should  protect  its  crew.  No  one  of  our 
former  major  treaties  with  Great  Britain  (1783,  1795,  1814) 
had  cleared  the  air  so  thoroughly  as  the  Webster-Ashburton 
Treaty.1  Had  it  not  been  for  the  insistent  demands  of  the  ex- 

1An  amusing  incident  of  the  treaty  was  the  so-called  "battle  of  the  maps." 
Webster  had  in  his  possession  a  map  discovered  by  Jared  Sparks  in  the  archives 
of  the  Department  of  Foreign  Affairs  at  Paris,  supposed  to  have  been  the  one 
used  by  Franklin  and  Vergennes  in  the  peace  negotiations  of  1782.  On  it  a  red 
line  marked  the  boundary,  giving  to  Canada  an  even  larger  share  of  the  disputed 
territory  than  Great  Britain  claimed  in  1842.  Webster  naturally  did  not  exhibit 
•  the  "red-line  map"  in  his  parley  with  Ashburton,  but  used  it  secretly  to  per- 
suade Maine  and  Massachusetts  of  the  excellence  of  the  bargain  he  was  making. 
On  the  other  hand,  Ashburton  was  probably  acquainted  with  the  Mitchell  map, 
used  in  the  negotiations  of  the  British  in  1783,  on  which  the  boundary  line  was 
as  favorable  to  the  United  States  as  that  of  the  "  red-line  map "  was  to  Canada. 
So  each  commissioner  could  persuade  himself  that  he  was  getting  the  better  of 
the  bargain. 


412  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

pansionists  for  Texas  and  Oregon,  our  troubles  with  the  mother 
country  would  seem  to  have  come  to  an  end. 

The  most  absorbing  issue  of  Tyler's  administration,  and  one 
of  the  most  fateful  issues  in  all  our  history,  was  the  annexation 
of  Texas.  Whatever  claims  we  may  have  had  to  Texas  as  part  of 
the  Louisiana  Purchase  territory  in  1803  were  surrendered  by 
the  treaty  of  1819  with  Spain,  which  fixed  the  southwestern 
boundary  of  the  United  States  at  the  Sabine  River.  Two  years 
later  Mexico  (of  which  Texas  was  a  province)  threw  off  its 
allegiance  to  Spain  in  the  general  revolt  of  the  South  and  Central 
American  colonies.  The  new  republic  of  Mexico  was  at  first 
very  favorable  to  immigration  from  the  United  States  into  Texas 
and  granted  large  tracts  of  land  on  easy  terms.  It  even  ex- 
cepted  Texas  from  the  operation  of  the  decree  of  1829,  which 
abolished  slavery  in  Mexico.  But  the  very  riext  year  a  sudden 
reversal  of  policy,  which  aimed  at  expelling  the  foreigners  from 
Texas,  led  to  an  uprising  in  which  the  Americans  joined  the 
native  " Liberals"  in  ejecting  the  Mexican  troops  from  the  prov- 
ince. A  wily  adventurer  named  Santa  Anna  took  advantage 
of  the  Liberal  revolt  to  get  control  of  the  government  in  Mexico 
and  then  threw  off  his  disguise  and  whipped  the  province  with 
scorpions  where  his  predecessors  had  used  rods.  Texas  was 
deprived  of  her  government  and  made  a  mere  military  depart- 
ment in  the  province  of  Coahuila.  The  inhabitants  of  Texas, 
of  whom  about  75  per  cent  were  American  immigrants,  had  no 
intention  of  yielding  to  such  tyranny.  They  organized  a  tem- 
porary government,  declared  their  independence  of  Mexico  on 
March  2,  1836,  and  on  April  21,  under  the  command  of  Sam 
Houston  of  Tennessee,  completely  defeated  the  invading  Mex- 
ican army  at  the  battle  of  San  Jacinto  and  took  its  general, 
Santa  Anna,  prisoner.  The  connection  between  Mexico  and 
Texas  was  forever  severed. 

Then  began  the  campaign  for  the  annexation  of  Texas  to 
the  United  States,  urged  by  Houston  (who  had  been  elected 
president  of  the  Texan  republic)  and  approved  by  the  almost 
unanimous  opinion  of  the  citizens  of  Texas,  but  denounced  by 
Mexico  as  a  cause  of  war  against  the  United  States.  For,  in 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  413 

spite  of  the  fact  that  she  was  impotent  to  recover  her  authority 
over  the  revolted  province,  Mexico  steadily  refused  to  recognize 
the  independence  of  Texas.  President  Jackson  was  heartily  in 
favor  of  the  annexation  of  Texas.  He  had  made  two  attempts 
(1829,  1835)  to  purchase  the  province  from  Mexico,  raising 
John  Quincy  Adams's  offer  of  $1,000,000  in  1827  to  $5,000,000 
and  even  urging,  in  the  proposition  of  1835,  that  Mexico  relin- 
quish the  land  between  the  parallels  of  37°  and  42°  north 
latitude  from  the  Rio  Grande  to  the  Pacific.1  Furthermore, 
Jackson  was  little  disturbed  by  delicate  scruples  in  his  methods 
of  acquiring  desirable  territory  for  the  United  States,  as  had 
been  proved  by  his  conduct  in  Florida.  But  now,  in  spite  of  the 
overwhelming  sentiment  of  the  Texans  in  favor  of  annexation 
and  in  spite  of  the  vote  of  both  Houses  of  Congress  to  recognize 
the  independence  of  Texas  when  she  should  have  shown  herself 
fit  to  maintain  her  government,  Jackson  hung  back.  The  alleged 
reason  was  that  the  annexation  of  Texas  would  bring  on  a  war 
with  Mexico,  but  the  fear  of  injuring  the  chances  of  his  candi- 
date Van  Buren  in  the  approaching  election  may  have  been  the 
more  cogent  reason.  The  abolitionist  agitation  over  the  rejec- 
tion of  the  antislavery  petitions  by  Congress  and  the  exclusion 
of  the  antislavery  literature  from  the  mails  was  at  its  height 
(p.  388).  Van  Buren  needed  the  Northern  votes  to  win,  and 
until  the  election  was  over,  Jackson  confined  himself  to  harmless 
negotiations  with  Mexico.  In  the  spring  of  1837,  however,  he 
recognized  the  independence  of  Texas  and  heightened  his  tone 
in  dealing  with  Mexico. 

Van  Buren,  however,  was  little  interested  in  expansion  and 
not  at  all  in  slavery.  He  would  have  had  no  inclination  to  favor 
the  annexation  policy,  even  if  the  storm  raised  by  the  panic  of 
1837  had  not  occupied  the  administration  with  financial  prob- 
lems. Instead  of  listening  to  the  overtures  of  the  Texan  envoy 

!It  was  asserted  by  Jackson's  enemies  that  the  failure  of  the  proposition  of 
1835  caused  Jackson  to  give  encouragement  to  Houston  to  secure  the  separation 
of  Texas  from  Mexico  by  arms.  There  is  some  color  given  to  the  charge  by  the 
fact  that  Houston,  after  a  visit  to  the  White  House,  boasted  that  Texas  would  be 
independent  and  that  he  should  be  its  first  president.  But  this  is  slim  evidence 
on  which  to  condemn  Jackson. 


414  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

at  Washington,  Van  Buren  preferred  to  negotiate  a  convention 
with  Mexico  for  the  settlement  of  our  claims  against  her.1  Inter- 
est in  the  annexation  project  waned  both  in  the  United  States  and 
in  Texas.  The  activities  of  the  American  Antislavery  Society,  the 
insistence  of  the  Northern  press  that  we  had  "  territory  enough, 
bad  morals  enough,  public  debt  enough"  already,  the  petitions 
to  Congress  (which  were  "measured  by  the  cubic  feet"),  the 
three  weeks'  speech  of  John  Quincy  Adams  against  annexation 
(in  the  closing  session  of  1838),  seemed  to  have  put  the  quietus 
on  the  measure.  The  new  president  of  Texas  (Lamar)  in  his 
inaugural  address  of  December,  1838,  advocated  a  free  and 
independent  Texas.  The  British  minister  at  Mexico  City  spoke 
of  the  annexation  project  as  "dead."  It  was  evident  that  the 
friends  of  annexation  would  have  to  wait  until  the  wheel  of 
political  fortune  brought  round  a  favorable  moment. 

That  moment  came  in  1842.  Tyler  had  "dished  the  Whigs," 
and  the  Whigs  had  repudiated  Tyler.  The  president  was  free 
to  develop  his  own  policy,  supported  by  his  new  cabinet  and 
his  coterie  of  Virginian  friends.  He  was  personally  in  favor  of 
annexation.  He  also  saw  in  the  issue  a  promising  platform  on 
which  to  unite  the  slave  interests  of  the  South  and  the  expan- 
sionist sentiment  of  the  North  for  the  next  presidential  cam- 
paign. Moreover,  Sam  Houston,  who,  in  spite  of  a  certain 
affectation  of  indifference,  was  always  at  heart  an  annexationist, 
had  been  reflected  to  the  presidency  of  the  Texan  republic  in 
1841.  Mexico  herself  stimulated  the  movement  when,  after 
six  years  of  inactivity,  she  suddenly  sent  a  considerable  army 
northward  for  the  reconquest  of  the  lost  province,  inciting  the 
adventurers  of  our  Southwestern  States  to  shoulder  their  mus- 
kets again  and  march  to  the  defense  of  their  "fellow-citizens"  in 
Texas.  Finally,  the  danger  of  British  intervention  in  Texas 

1The  behavior  of  Mexico  in  regard  to  these  claims  shows  what  kind  of  gov- 
ernment we  had  to  deal  with  in  the  decade  preceding  the  Mexican  War.  Al- 
though the  convention  was  concluded  in  1838,  more  than  two  years  elapsed  before 
Mexico  appointed  her  commissioners,  and  another  two,  filled  with  excuses  and 
evasions,  before  she  agreed  to  pay  the  modest  sum  of  $2,000,000  in  equal  quar- 
terly installments  extending  over  a  space  of  five  years.  After  the  first  three  in- 
stallments of  $100,000  each,  Mexico  stopped  paying. 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  415 

began  to  loom  large  and  to  arouse  all  those  fears  and  resent- 
ments which  the  American  people  have  been  quick  to  feel 
whenever  the  menace  of  European  intervention  has  appeared 
on  this  continent. 

The  interest  of  Great  Britain  in  a  free  and  independent  Texas 
was  obvious.  She  was  willing  to  guarantee  Texas  a  large 
loan  in  return  for  the  abolition  of  slavery  in  the  republic.  She 
was  eager  to  have  in  Texas  a  source  of  supply  of  cotton  and 
other  raw  materials  for  which  she  could  exchange  her  manu- 
factures unhampered  by  the  tariff  laws  of  the  American  Union. 
Her  minister  in  Mexico  was  working  to  effect  an  arrangement 
by  which  the  independence  of  Texas  might  be  acknowledged 
and  hostilities  brought  to  an  end.  As  mediator  between  Mexico 
and  her  revolted  province  and  as  guarantor  of  the  independence 
granted,  Great  Britain  would  inevitably  have  an  enormous 
influence  in  both  countries.  The  British  government  protested 
at  every  stage  in  the  negotiations  over  Texas  (and  doubtless 
with  truth)  that  her  diplomatic  conduct  was  perfectly  "cor- 
rect"; nevertheless,  there  was  a  widespread  feeling  in  our 
country  that  Great  Britain  intended  to  establish  a  kind  of  "pro- 
tectorate" over  Texas.  And  against  that  the  Monroe  Doctrine 
was  explicit.1 

When  the  two  great  Whig  leaders  were  removed  from  public 
life  by  the  retirement  of  Clay  from  the  Senate  in  the  spring 
of  1842  and  the  resignation  of  Webster  from  the  c'abinet  a  year 
later,  Tyler  moved  directly  toward  his  goal.  Upshur  of  Vir- 
ginia succeeded  to  the  headship  of  the  Department  of  State  in 
the  autumn  of  1843  and  began  negotiations  with  Texas  for  a 
treaty  of  annexation.  The  Texan  government,  under  the  rebuff 
that  it  had  suffered  from  the  Van  Buren  administration,  had 
given  up  the  idea  of  annexation  and  concluded  treaties  with 
France  (1839),  Holland  (1840),  Belgium  and  Great  Britain 
(1842).  The  latter  power  was  determined  that  Texas  should 

1For  example,  the  Washington  Madisonian  (President  Tyler's  organ)  said  that 
if  England  interfered  in  Texas,  the  whole  American  people  "would  rise  like  one 
vast  nest  of  hornets,"  and  that  the  Western  States  "  at  the  call  of  Captain  Tyler 
would  pour  their  noble  sons  down  the  Mississippi  valley  by  millions." 


41 6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

not  be  joined  to  the  United  States.  Brougham  made  speeches 
in  the  House  of  Lords  (August,  1843)  denouncing  the  "hideous 
crime  of  breeding  negroes,"  and  members  of  Parliament  openly 
declared  that  "England  must  maintain  her  ascendency  in 
Texas."  In  the  summer  of  1843  tne  British  minister  in  Mexico 
succeeded  in  bringing  about  a  truce  between  Mexico  and  Texas, 
which  gave  promise  of  the  recognition  of  the  independence  of 
the  latter  if  she  would  not  ally  herself  with  the  United  States. 
Furthermore,  the  antislavery  forces  were  aroused  by  the  re- 
newal of  the  attempt  at  annexation.  John  Quincy  Adams  and 
twelve  of  his  associates  in  the  House  issued  a  defiant  address 
in  March,  1843,  charging  that  the  American  settlements  had 
been  made  in  Texas,  the  revolt  from  Mexico  instigated,  and  the 
efforts  of  Mexico  to  regain  Texas  prevented,  solely  in  order 
that  "the  undue  ascendency  of  the  slave  power  should  be 
secured  and  riveted  beyond  all  redemption,"  and  that  there 
was  no  obligation  on  the  part  of  the  states  of  the  Union  to  ac- 
quiesce in  a  treaty  of  annexation — since  such  a  treaty  could  not 
be  made  "under  the  Constitution."  Annexation,  said  other 
warning  voices  at  the  North,  would  lead  to  war  with  Mexico,1 
would  increase  the  power  of  the  South,  would  whet  a  desire  to 
acquire  Mexico  and  Canada,  would  saddle  us  with  a  large  Texan 
debt,  and  would  enrich  the  speculators  in  Texan  lands.  "It  is 
the  contemptible  scheme  of  a  poor  miserable  traitor  tempora- 
rily acting  as"  President,"  said  a  Boston  paper.  John  Greenleaf 
Whittier  rang  the  tocsin  for  the  country  in  danger : 

Up  the  hillside,  down  the  glen, 
Rouse  the  sleeping  citizen, 
Summon  out  the  might  of  men. 

But  not  all  the  men  of  the  North  felt  like  Adams  and  Whit- 
tier.  Secretary  Upshur  appealed  to  the  manufacturer  and  the 

JIn  the  autumn  of  1842  our  Commodore  Jones  on  the  Pacific  coast,  acting  on 
a  rumor  that  war  had  actually  broken  out  between  the  United  States  and  Mex- 
ico, sailed  into  the  Californian  harbor  of  Monterey,  occupied  the  town,  and  ran 
up  the  American  flag  on  the  government  building.  As  soon  as  he  learned  of  the 
falseness  of  the  rumor  he  retired,  and  apologies  were  made.  But  the  incident 
gave  color  to  the  charge  that  we  were  anxious  for  war. 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  417 

merchant  by  insisting  on  the  advantages  which  would  ac- 
crue from  annexation:  cheaper  cotton,  new  harbors,  enlarged 
markets.  Our  exports  to  Texas  had  shrunk  since  1839  from 
$1,687,082  to  $190,604.  From  an  economic  point  of  view,  at 
least,  the  new  republic  was  fast  becoming  a  British  protectorate. 
If  the  establishment  of  a  free  Texas  under  English  auspices 
would  endanger  the  South  by  furnishing  a  refuge  for  fugitive 
slaves  or  a  base  for  abolitionist  raids,  it  would  also  menace  the 
protective  system  of  the  North  by  offering  an  opportunity  for 
smuggling  millions  of  dollars'  worth  of  British  manufactures 
across  the  borders,  where  little  respect  for  tariff  laws  existed. 
When  Upshur  met  his  tragic  death,  in  February,  1844,  by 
the  explosion  of  a  new  gun  on  the  ship  of  war  Princeton,  his 
work  was  continued  by  his  successor  in  the  State  Department, 
John  C.  Calhoun,  an  even  more  ardent  annexationist.  Calhoun 
was  ambitious  for  the  presidency,  and  this  seemed  to  be  his 
chance.  He  was  not  embarrassed,  like  Tyler,  with  past  Whig 
connections.  He  did  not  have  to  reconcile  a  Southern  policy 
with  Northern  antislavery  feeling,  like  the  New  Yorker  Van 
Buren.  He  was  an  avowed  slavery  champion  and  expansionist. 
He  used  boldness  and  even  disingenuous  audacity  to  compass 
his  end.  When  Lord  Aberdeen  wrote  a  letter  to  Pakenham, 
the  British  minister  in  Washington,  which  only  repeated  the 
expressions  of  England's  interest  in  emancipation  in  Texas,  as 
in  the  whole  world,  Calhoun  represented  it  as  a  new  and  dan- 
gerous attack  of  Great  Britain  on  the  "peculiar  institution" 
of  the  South;  and,  in  spite  of  Aberdeen's  explicit  denial  of 
any  intent  to  "disturb  their  [Texas's]  internal  tranquillity  or 
thereby  to  affect  the  prosperity  of  the  American  Union,"  Cal- 
houn declared  that  if  we  did  not  take  Texas,  England  would. 
Texas  having  been  assured  (by  Calhoun's  agent)  that  no 
harm  would  come  to  her  if  she  entered  upon  negotiations,  the 
treaty  was  signed  on  April  12,  1844.  It  provided  that  Texas 
should  become  a  territory  of  the  Union,  that  she  should  sur- 
render, her  public  lands,  and  that  the  American  government 
should  assume  her  debt  up  to  $10,000,000.  On  April  22  John 
Quincy  Adams  wrote  in  his  "Diary,"  "The  treaty  for  the  annex- 


418  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ation  of  Texas  to  the  Union  was  this  day  sent  to  the  Senate, 
and  with  it  went  the  freedom  of  the  human  race." 

The  presidential  campaign  of  1844  was  approaching.  A  few 
days  after  Adams's  obituary  on  the  freedom  of  the  human  race 
Henry  Clay,  already  assured  of  the  Whig  nomination,  published 
his  famous  "Raleigh  letter"  in  a  Washington  paper,  in  which 
he  said  that  the  annexation  of  Texas  would  be  tantamount  to 
a  declaration  of  war  on  Mexico  and  an  act  transcending  the 
power  of  the  executive.  He  regarded  the  project  as  a  revengeful 
move  on  Tyler's  part  to  disrupt  the  Whig  party.  It  was,  he 
said,  "dangerous  to  the  Union,  inexpedient  in  the  present  finan- 
cial condition  of  the  country,  and  not  called  for  by  any  general 
expression  of  opinion."  On  the  evening  of  the  same  day  a 
letter  from  Van  Buren,  the  most  likely  nominee  of  the  Demo- 
crats, appeared  in  another  Washington  paper,  disapproving 
annexation,  but  in  more  guarded  terms.  Clay  was  unanimously 
nominated  by  the  Whigs  at  Baltimore  (May  i),  and  the  plat- 
form of  the  convention,  by  his  request,  was  silent  on  the  subject 
of  Texas.  In  the  Democratic  convention,  held  in  the  same  city 
(May  27),  Van  Buren  led  on  the  first  ballot,  but  failed  to  get 
the  two-thirds  vote  necessary  to  nominate.  The  friends  of 
annexation,  who  could  not  stake  the  success  of  the  Democratic 
party  on  the  purely  sectional  candidate  Calhoun,  finally  united 
on  James  K.  Polk  of  Tennessee,  a  "dark  horse,"  who  first 
figured  with  44  votes  on  the  eighth  ballot,  and  on  the  ninth 
carried  every  delegation  of  the  convention  in  a  veritable  stam- 
pede. Polk  was  a  conscientious,  diligent  man  of  moderate 
ability,  somewhat  slow  and  inelastic  in  mind,  often  confusing 
insistence  on  a  detail  with  fidelity  to  a  principle.  His  ambition 
in  1844  was  limited  to  a  nomination  for  the  vice  presidency. 
He  had  served  inconspicuously  as  Speaker  of  the  House,  and 
one  term  as  governor  of  Tennessee,  having  been  defeated  in 
his  two  succeeding  campaigns  for  the  latter  office.  As  a  warm 
friend  and  political  protege  of  Jackson's  he  could  command  the 
support  of  that  large  section  of  the  Democratic  party,  both 
North  and  South,  for  whom  the  old  hero  was  still  an  oracle ; 
and  as  an  ardent  annexationist  he  could  satisfy  those  Southern 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  419 

interests  which  were  looking  to  Jackson's  old  rival  Calhoun. 
The  platform  on  which  Polk  ran  declared  for  "the  reoccu- 
pation  of  Oregon  and  the  reannexation  of  Texas  at  the  earliest 
practicable  period"  as  "great  American  measures."1 

Early  in  June,  Calhoun's  treaty  of  annexation  was  defeated 
in  the  Senate  by  16  yeas  to  35  nays.  This  crushing  defeat  of  a 
treaty  for  which  both  Upshur  and  Calhoun  had  confidently 
claimed  a  two-thirds  majority  was  due  to  a  combination  of 
reasons,  in  which  real  opposition  to  the  acquisition  of  Texas 
probably  played  a  small  part.  Some  of  the  potent  factors  were 
fidelity  to  Clay  in  his  "Raleigh  letter";  fear  of  precipitating 
war  with  Mexico;  unwillingness  to  enrich  the  speculators  in 
Texas  land  scrip ;  reluctance  to  rousing  another  Missouri  ques- 
tion ;  and  hostility  to  Calhoun  for  his  high-handed  conduct  of 
the  negotiations,  his  manifest  bid  for  the  presidency,  his  disin- 
genuous use  of  the  Pakenham  correspondence,  and  his  commit- 
ment of  the  government  to  a  military  and  naval  protection  of 
Texas  pending  the  discussions. 

The  defeat  of  the  treaty  brought  the  Texas  issue  before  the 
people  at  the  polls  in  November.  When  Clay  found  himself 
opposed  to  Polk,  an  avowed  annexationist,  instead  of  to  Van 
Buren,  as  he  had  expected,  he  was  embarrassed  by  the  "Raleigh 
letter"  and  wrote  other  letters  to  the  effect  that  he  "would  be 
glad  to  see  Texas  admitted  on  fair  terms,"  and  that  "slavery 
ought  not  to  affect  the  question  one  way  or  the  other."  This 
blowing  hot  and  cold,  to  win  both  North  and  South,  disgusted 
the  antislavery  Whig  leaders,  like  Seward,  Corwin,  Fillmore,  and 
Webster.  It  put  them  on  the  defensive  to  "explain"  their  can- 
didate's position  and  convinced  them  that  Clay  lacked  moral 
conviction  on  the  subject.  Enough  Whigs  in  Michigan  and  New 
York  cast  their  ballots  for  the  abolitionist  candidate,  Birney, 
to  throw  those  states  into  the  Polk  column.  At  the  same  time, 

1  On  the  same  day  as  the  Democratic  convention  a  large  body  of  delegates  met 
in  Baltimore  and  renominated  Tyler  for  the  presidency.  But  the  Tyler  ticket 
had  no  strength.  On  the  assurance  from  Jackson  and  other  leaders  of  the  party 
that  he  would  be  received  back  into  the  Democratic  fold  without  penalty  to  his 
followers,  Tyler  resigned  his  candidacy  and  led  his  following  into  the  Polk  camp. 


420  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

however,  Clay  carried  his  own  state  of  Kentucky  and. his  op- 
ponent's state  of  Tennessee,  both  of  which  on  the  single  issue 
of  annexation  would  have  gone  to  Polk.  And  with  Michigan 
and  New  York  in  the  Clay  column  and  Kentucky  and  Tennessee 
in  the  Polk  column,  the  latter  would  still  have  won  the  election. 
The  Democrats  undoubtedly  profited  by  a  large  number  of 
votes  of  fraudulently  naturalized  foreigners  in  the  Middle 
States,  as  well  as  by  the  clever  representation,  by  party  leaders 
in  Pennsylvania,  of  Polk  as  a  friend  of  the  tariff  of  1842.  The 
gallant  Clay  was  thus  for  a  third  time  defeated  for  the  pres- 
idency, and,  to  make  the  humiliation  doubly  bitter,  by  a  man 
almost  obscure.  The  electoral  vote  was  170  to  105,  but  Polk's 
popular  majority  was  less  than  40,000. 

In  spite  of  the  complexity  of  issues  in  the  campaign,  and  in 
spite  of  the  meager  margin  in  the  popular  vote,  the  Democrats 
declared  that  the  voice  of  the  people  had  given  a  clear  mandate 
for  annexation.  Tyler  did  not  wait  for  Polk  to  carry  out  the 
mandate.  To  his  last  session  of  Congress,  which  convened  in 
December,  1844,  he  announced,  with  not  the  strictest  regard  for 
truth,  that  "a  large  majority  of  the  states  had  declared  for 
annexation."1  After  a  debate  extending  through  the  whole  ses- 
sion, both  Houses  passed  a  resolution  (132  to  76  in  the  House, 
27  to  25  in  the  Senate)  for  the  admission  of  Texas  to  the  Union, 
on  condition  that  she  should  frame  and  submit  to  Congress  a 
constitution  before  January  i,  1846.  Texas  was  to  surrender 
her  public  buildings,  works  of  defense,  ports  and  harbors,  to 
the  United  States,  retaining  her  public  lands  and  her  debt.  The 
United  States  were  to  assume  the  controversy  over  her  bound- 
aries. Four  other  states  might,  with  her  consent,  be  carved 
from  her  territory.  Slavery  was  to  be  prohibited  north  of  the 
line  36°  30'. 

The  resolution  was  signed  by  Tyler  on  March  i,  and  two 
days  later  A.  J.  Donalson,  Jackson's  nephew,  was  dispatched  to 
Texas,  where  he  labored  with  tact  and  diligence  to  secure  the 
acceptance  of  the  terms.  Great  Britain,  in  a  last  attempt  to 

irrhe  vote  by  states  was  actually  15  to  n :  8  Southern  and  7  Northern  states 
for  Polk,  and  5  Southern  and  6  Northern  states  for  Clay. 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  421 

prevent  the  absorption  of  Texas  into  the  Union,  persuaded 
Mexico  to  agree  to  a  treaty  (May  19,  1845)  recognizing  the 
independence  of  Texas  if  she  would  remain  a  separate  republic. 
But  the  Texan  Senate,  convinced  by  Donalson's  assurances  of 
our  good  will,  unanimously  rejected  the  Mexican  offer.  On 
July  4,  1845,  a  convention  of  Texan  delegates  adopted  by  a 
unanimous  vote  a  constitution  accepting  annexation  to  the 
United  States,  and  the  people  of  Texas  ratified  the  constitution 
in  October  with  only  44  dissenting  voices.  Congress  received 
the  new  state  by  a  large  majority  in  both  Houses,  President 
Polk  signed  the  act  of  admission  (December  29,  1845),  an^  the 
laws  of  the  Union  were  formally  extended  over  the  land  beyond 
the  Sabine.  On  a  February  day  of  1846  the  blue  flag  of  Texas, 
with  its  lone  white  star — the  emblem  of  the  republic  which  for 
ten  years  had  lived  its  precarious  life  of  poverty,  intrigue,  and 
war — was  hauled  down,  and  in  its  place  were  raised  the  Stars 
and  Stripes. 

THE  MEXICAN  WAR 

The  annexation  of  Texas  was  one  of  the  most  fateful  events 
.in  our  history.  It  was  the  first  link  in  a  chain  of  consequences 
which  ended  in  secession  and  civil  war.  For  it  precipitated  a 
struggle  with  Mexico,  which  brought  us  new  Western  territory, 
in  which  was  established  a  new  principle  for  the  control  of 
slavery,  which  was  the  pretext  for  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri 
Compromise,  which  roused  the  North  to  form  the  Republican 
party,  whose  election  of  Abraham  Lincoln  to  the  presidency 
drove  the  South  to  secede  and  make  the  appeal  to  arms.  The 
historian,  looking  back  through  the  refracting  medium  of  an 
atmosphere  clouded  with  the  sectional  strife  of  a  score  of  years, 
from  the  annexation  of  Texas  to  the  surrender  of  Lee  at 
Appomattox,  is  tempted  to  see  in  the  annexation  policy  only  a 
deliberate  provocation  of  the  strife,  "a  dark-lantern  con- 
spiracy," "a  diabolical  plot,"  to  get  "bigger  pens  to  cram  with 
slaves."  But  this  judgment  is  not  fair  to  the  facts  in  the  case. 
Texas  was  annexed  by  majorities  in  both  Houses  of  Congress, 
after  an  enormous  amount  of  discussion  and  argument  and  after 


422  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  national  election  favorable  to  a  candidate  who  ran  on  a  plat- 
form calling  for  annexation  as  a  "great  American  measure." 
Moreover,  great  as  the  interest  of  the  slaveholders  might  be  in 
the  project,  the  general  sentiment  in  favor  of  territorial  expan- 
sion was  greater.  That  we  should  carry  our  boundary  to  the 
Rio  Grande,  and  so  regain  the  region  " ceded"  to  Spain  by  the 
treaty  of  181-9;  that  we  should  extend  our  protection  over  our 
" fellow-citizens"  in  Texas;  that  we  should  rebuke  Mexico  for 
her  impudent  and  impotent  defiance;  that  we  should  thwart 
Great  Britain's  designs  to  dictate  the  policy  of  a  country  on  our 
borders, — all  these  were  powerful  motives  with  thousands  of 
voters  who  had  no  wish  to  extend  the  limits  of  slave  soil.  A  few 
prophetic  souls  might  foresee  the  consequences  and  heed  James 
Russell  Lowell's  warning  that  "they  enslave  their  children's 
children  who  make  compromise  with  sin,"  but  the  majority  were 
ready  to  take  possession  of  Texas  and  leave  the  reckoning  with 
slavery  to  the  future. 

In  the  summer  of  1843  the  Mexican  government  had  an- 
nounced to  our  minister  that  it  would  consider  the  passage  of 
an  act  for  the  incorporation  of  Texas  into  the  territory  of  the 
United  States  as  equivalent  to  a  declaration  of  war  against  the 
Mexican  Republic.  But  this  was  a  dog-in-the-manger  policy. 
The  Mexican  Minister  of  War  himself  confessed  in  1844  that 
his  country  had  made  no  serious  attempt  to  subdue  Texas  after 
the  battle  of  San  Jacinto.  Lord  Palmerston  characterized 
Mexico's  prospects  of  regaining  the  lost  province  as  "visionary," 
and  Lord  Ashburton  told  Clay  in  1842  that  England  would 
sooner  expect  to  see  Texas  conquer  Mexico  than  Mexico  con- 
quer Texas.  Even  Almonte,  the  Mexican  minister  at  Washing- 
ton, acknowledged  to  Upshur  in  1844  that  his  country  had  no 
chance  of  recovering  Texas  but  that  it  was  a  "point  of  honor" 
with  Mexico  not  to  recognize  her  independence.  The  point  of 
honor,  however,  was  quickly  waived,  as  we  have  seen,  in  the 
spring  of  1,845?  when  annexation  was  imminent.  The  sole  aim 
of  Mexico  (and  Great  Britain)  in  Texas  was  to  keep  that  state 
out  of  the  American  Union.  This  is  not  a  justification  for  our 
annexation  of  Texas,  but  it  is  a  sufficient  answer  to  those  his- 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  423 

torians  who  have  shown  themselves  so  tender  of  Mexico's  vio- 
lated "sovereignty"  in  the  province. 

Furthermore,  the  unbridled  insolence  of  the  Mexican  officials 
and  press  toward  the  United  States  could  not  but  encourage  the 
war  spirit  in  both  countries.  John  Slidell  of  Louisiana  was  sent 
by  President  Polk  in  the  autumn  of  1845  to  negotiate  with 
Mexico  the  adjustment  of  our  claims  and  of  the  boundary  of 
Texas.  He  was  authorized  to  offer  Mexico  $25,000,000  for 
California  and  $5,000,000  for  New  Mexico,  but  "at  all  events,, 
to  take  up  the  matter  in  a  prudent  and  friendly  spirit,  and  to 
conciliate  the  good  will  of  the  Mexicans."  He  was  refused  an 
audience  by  two  successive  Mexican  presidents,  who  did  not 
dare  risk  their  precarious  authority  by  seeming  to  make  any 
concessions  to  the  United  States  or  running  counter  to  the 
blustering  war  spirit  of  their  countrymen.  It  is  true  that  Polk 
wanted  Upper  California  and  instructed  Slidell  to  negotiate  for 
its  purchase,  but  only  if  he  could  do  so  "without  endangering 
the  restoration  of  amicable  relations  with  Mexico."  The  re- 
proach heaped  on  Polk  that  he  "drove  Mexico  into  war"  is 
unjust.  The  United  States  was  not  the  wolf  and  Mexico  the 
lamb  of  La  Fontaine's  fable.  It  was  Mexico  that  insisted  on 
war  and  began  the  hostilities.  The  Mexican  authorities  believed 
that  our  army  was  contemptible  and  cowardly,  that  it  would  fall 
an  easy  prey  to  their  own  brilliant  generals,  and  that  the  rapid 
victory  over  the  "bullies  of  the  North"  would  confirm  their 
own  dictatorship  over  the  Mexican  people.  When  Polk  was 
denounced  in  the  United  States  (as  he  has  been  ever  since)  for 
forcing  a  war  on  Mexico,  he  was  being  reviled  by  the  Mexicans 
for  trying  to  force  peace  upon  them !  Santa  Anna  himself  con- 
fessed openly  in  1847  tnat  "the  Mexicans  desired  the  war." 
Of  course  it  is  an  easy  solution  to  sneer  at  all  of  Folk's  efforts  at 
peace  as  camouflage  and  to  cry  with  Alexander  Stephens  of 
Georgia,  "Polk  the  Mendacious!"  But  another  Georgian, 
Robert  Toombs,  said,  "Polk  never  desired  any  war  but  war  on 
the  Whigs."  "It  is  hard  to  think  of  any  rational  method  to 
conciliate  Mexico,"  says  Justin  H.  Smith,  "that  Polk  did  not 
put  into  operation." 


424  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Having  annexed  Texas,  it  was  our  duty  to  protect  her  soil. 
Mexican  troops  were  grouped  at  Matamoras,  on  the  southern 
bank  of  the  Rio  Grande.  The  horrors  of  the  Alamo  and 
Goliad  might  be  repeated.  General  Zachary  Taylor,  in  com- 
mand of  about  2000  regular  troops  in  the  Southwest,  had  been 
ordered  to  proceed  into  Texas  in  the  summer  of  1845  and  had 
established  his  camp  near  Corpus  Christi,  on  the  Nueces  River. 
When  word  came,  early  in  1846,  that  the  Mexican  government 
•would  not  receive  Slidell,  Polk  ordered  Taylor  to  advance  to 
the  Rio  Grande.  Here  Taylor  erected  a  fort  opposite  Mat- 
amoras as  a  warning  to  the  Mexicans  not  to  cross  the  river, 
which  Texas  claimed  as  her  boundary  line.  Taylor  offered  to 
keep  the  river  open  if  the  Mexican  commander  Ampudia  would 
promise  to  refrain  from  hostilities,  but  the  offer  was  refused. 
Instead,  Ampudia  ordered  Taylor  to  return  to  the  Nueces 
within  twenty-four  hours.1  On  April  24,  1846,  the  Mexicans 
crossed  the  river  and  captured  a  reconnoitering  party  of  about 
60  dragoons  under  Captain  Thornton.  When  Taylor  with- 
drew to  Point  Isabel  to  protect  his  base  of  supplies  and  receive 
reinforcements  sent  from  New  Orleans,  the  Mexicans  crossed 
the  river  in  force.  Taylor  met  them  at  Palo  Alto,  about  ten 
miles  north  of  the  Rio  Grande,  on  May  8,  and  inflicted  a  severe 
defeat  on  them.  The  next  day  he  drove  them  from  the  wooded 
ravine  of  Resaca  de  la  Palma  back  to  the  south  side  of  the 
river.  On  the  eighteenth  he  occupied  the  town  of  Matamoras, 
and  the  invasion  of  Mexico  was  begun. 

Meantime  President  Polk,  whose  purpose  was  to  "pursue  a 
bold  and  firm  course"  toward  Mexico  and  to  "conquer  a 
peace"  by  waging  war  with  the  sword  in  one  hand  and  the  olive 
branch  in  the  other,  was  maturing  his  plans  in  Washington.  On 
the  very  day  that  the  battle  of  Palo  Alto  was  fought,  Slidell, 
returned  from  his  fruitless  mission,  called  at  the  White  House. 
The  next  day  news  arrived,  after  the  adjournment  of  the  cabinet 

^^As  Mexico  claimed  the  whole  of  Texas,  Taylor's  presence  on  the  Nueces  with 
an  army  was,  of  course,  as  much  an  "invasion"  of  Mexican  territory  as  was  his 
presence  on  the  Rio  Grande. 


THE  MEXICAN  WAR  AND  THE  MEXICAN  CESSION 


426  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

meeting,  of  the  attack  on  Captain  Thornton.  Polk  reassembled 
the  cabinet  in  the  evening,  and  with  their  unanimous  consent 
decided  to  send  a  war  message  to  Congress.  "After  reiterated 
menaces,"  said  the  message,  "  Mexico  has  passed  the  boundary 
of  the  United  States  and  has  shed  American  blood  on  American 
soil.  .  .  .  War  exists,  and,  notwithstanding  all  our  efforts  to 
avoid  it,  exists  by  the  act  of  Mexico  herself."  The  President 
called  for  volunteers  to  serve  for  not  less  than  six  or  twelve 
months.  In  spite  of  some  opposition  by  the  Whigs,  a  bill  to 
raise  50,000  troops  and  $10,000,000  was  passed  through  the 
House  by  a  vote  of  174  to  14,  and  the  Senate  by  a  vote  of  40 
to  2.  On  May  13  Polk  signed  the  bill,  and  the  gates  of  war  were 
opened.  Except  for  New  England,  where  the  abolitionist  spirit 
was  most  strong,  the  country  responded  with  enthusiasm  to  the 
call  for  troops.  Soon  23,000  volunteers  from  the  Western  and 
Southern  states  were  in  arms.  The  cry  was,  "Ho  for  the  halls 
of  the  Montezumas !  " 

The  plan  of  the  administration  was  to  take  possession  of 
New  Mexico,  Upper  California,  and  the  northern  provinces  of 
Mexico — in  all  of  which  distant  regions  the  authority  of  the 
Mexican  government  was  weak — and,  holding  these  regions  in 
pawn,  force  Mexico  to  the  terms  which  we  had  been  unable  to 
get  by  negotiation.  The  "conquest"  of  this  vast  territory  in 
the  summer  and  autumn  months  of  1846  offered  little  difficulty 
beyond  the  resistance  of  mountain  and  desert.  Colonel  S.  W. 
Kearny  set  out  from  Fort  Leavenworth,  Kansas,  near  the  end 
of  June,  and  in  August  entered  Santa  Fe  with  about  18,000  men, 
a  Mexican  force  of  4000  retreating  before  him  without  a  fight. 
Raising  the  American  flag,  he  declared  the  territory  of  New 
Mexico  "incorporated  in  the  United  States"  and  absolved  the 
inhabitants  from  their  allegiance  to  Mexico.  A  few  days  later 
he  published  a  code  of  laws  for  the  territory,  providing  for  a 
general  assembly  to  meet  the  first  of  August.  He  then  set  out, 
by  way  of  the  Rio  Grande  and  Gila  valleys,  for  California  with 
but  300  dragoons,  having  detached  Colonel  Doniphan  with 
850  men  to  join  General  Wool  at  the  Mexican  town  of  Chi- 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  427 

huahua.1  When  Kearny  was  eleven  days  out  of  Santa  Fe  he 
met  the  scout  Kit  Carson  coming  eastward,  who  told  him  that 
California  was  conquered  by  American  arms.  Continuing  with 
100  dragoons,  Kearny  reached  the  California  frontier  at  the 
beginning  of  December  and,  after  some  skirmishes  with  the 
natives  at  San  Pascual,  entered  San  Diego. 

The  year  had  been  filled  with  exciting  events  in  California. 
That  magnificent  but  neglected  land  lay  open  like  a  prize  to 
the  first  power  that  should  take  it.  Mexican  authority  there  was 
only  "a  shadow."  The  province,  according  to  a  Mexican  offi- 
cial, "had  been  forgotten  for  more  than  20  years."  The  white 
inhabitants  were  ready  to  shake  off  their  allegiance  to  Mexico, 
"not  caring,"  as  an  American  traveler  observed,  "what  flag  they 
exchanged  for  their  own."  An  attache  of  the  French  legation 
in  Mexico  had  suggested  a  French  protectorate  over  California. 
The  London  Times  was  urging  the  British  government  to  oc- 
cupy the  province.  But  no  power  seemed  willing  itself  to  take 
California  or  to  let  any  other  power  take  it.  Much  as  Polk 
wanted  Upper  California,  he  wrote  to  Larkin,  our  confidential 
agent  at  Monterey,  that  "the  President  would  make  no  effort 
and  use  no  influence  to  induce  California  to  become  one  of  the 
free  and  independent  states  of  this  Union"  unless  the  people 
of  California  should  desire  it  and  it  could  be  done  "without 
affording  Mexico  just  cause  of  complaint"  (October,  1845). 
Some  time  earlier  Commodore  Sloat,  in  command  of  our  naval 
forces  on  the  Pacific  coast,  had  been  ordered  to  be  "assiduously 
careful  not  to  commit  any  act  of  aggression,"  but  to  seize  San 
Francisco  if  he  should  learn  "with  certainty  beyond  a  doubt" 
that  Mexico  had  declared  war.  Sloat  got  news  of  the  battles 
on  the  Rio  Grande  at  the  end  of  May,  1846,  and  after  long 

1Wool,  who  had  marched  from  San  Antonio,  Texas,  to  occupy  Chihuahua, 
changed  his  plans  for  a  variety  of  reasons,  political  and  strategic,  and  joined 
Taylor's  army  of  occupation  at  Saltillo.  Doniphan,  ignorant  of  Wool's  move- 
ment, proceeded  to  Chihuahua  by  way  of  El  Paso,  fighting  now  and  then,  and 
finally,  after  a  march  of  a  thousand  miles,  found  Wool  at  Saltillo.  All  this  tedi- 
ous marching  of  Wool  and  Doniphan  had  little  direct  bearing  on  the  fortunes  of 
the  war,  except  to  demonstrate  the  courage  and  endurance  of  the  American  soldier. 


428  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

hesitation  (for  which  he  was  later  superseded  in  his  com- 
mand by  Commodore  R.  F.  Stockton)  sailed  into  the  harbor 
of  Monterey  and  raised  the  American  flag  a  second  time  above 
the  town  (July  7,  1846). 

The  Stars  and  Stripes  had  floated  for  only  twelve  days  over 
Monterey  when  a  band  of  160  men,  "with  gaunt  bodies,  frames 
of  steel,  shaggy  beards,  and  an  air  of  indescribable  courage," 
rode  into  the  town.  They  were  American  pioneers,  and  at  their 
head  was  Captain  John  C.  Fremont,  topographical  engineer 
and  explorer  in  the  service  of  the  United  States.  Fremont  was 
making  the  third  of  those  extended  expeditions  between  the 
Missouri  River  and  the  Pacific  coast  which  earned  for  him  the 
title  of  "the  Pathfinder."  The  prospect  of  war  with  Mexico 
and  the  caution  of  his  superior  at  Washington,  far  from  deter- 
ring him  from  his  journey,  only  made  the  deep-set  eyes  beneath 
his  high  narrow  forehead  and  shock  of  inky  black  hair  burn 
brighter  with  the  fire  of  adventure.  When  he  entered  California, 
early  in  1846,  with  an  armed  band,  he  was  warned  by  Governor 
Castro  to  leave  the  province.  Instead,  he  built  a  fort  and 
awaited  the  Californians'  attack — in  vain.  He  then  proceeded 
to  the  border  of  Oregon,  where  he  was  overtaken  by  Lieutenant 
Gillespie,  under  government  orders,  and  persuaded  to  return 
to  the  Sacramento  valley.  While  he  was  encamped  here  some 
of  his  men  joined  a  party  of  American  settlers  under  William 
B.  Ide  in  seizing  the  town  of  Sonoma  and  proclaiming  the 
Republic  of  California  under  the  famous  "Bear  Flag."1  On 
the  appeal  of  the  insurgents  Fremont  put  himself  at  the  head 
of  the  Bear  Flag  movement,  and  was  preparing  to  resist  in  arms 
the  force  which  Castro  had  dispatched  for  the  recapture  of 
Sonoma,  when  the  news  came  of  Sloat's  seizure  of  Monterey. 
The  bear  then  came  down,  and  the  Stars  and  Stripes  were  raised 
in  his  place.  Fremont,  now  transformed  from  the  explorer  into 
the  soldier,  joined  Stockton  in  the  conquest  of  the  southern  part 

xThe  flag  consisted  of  a  piece  of  white  cotton,  to  the  bottom  of  which  was 
sewed  a  strip  of  red  flannel.  In  the  upper  left-hand  corner  of  the  white  was 
painted  a  red  star,  and  to  the  right  of  it  an  "impressionistic"  bear.  Under  the 
star  and  bear  were  the  words  "  California  Republic." 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  429 

of  Upper  California.  It  was  here  that  Kearny  met  them,  as 
we  have  seen,  and  by  his  victory  at  San  Pascual  helped  to  secure 
the  conquest.  In  January,  1847,  the  California  leaders  sur- 
rendered to  Fremont,' and  the  shadowy  authority  of  Mexico  in 
the  province  came  to  an  end.  Fremont,  encouraged  doubtless 
by  his  strenuous  father-in-law,  Senator  Ben  ton,  intended  to 
organize  California  as  a  territory  of  the  United  States  and 
assume  the  governorship  himself.  But  Kearny,  with  positive 
orders  from  President  Polk  to  hold  the  province  under  military 
rule,  vindicated  his  authority  after  an  unseemly  quarrel  with 
Fremont  and  Stockton  which  resulted  in  Fremont's  court- 
martial  and  dismissal  from  the  service.  The  President  remitted 
the  sentence,  but  Fremont  resigned. 

Meanwhile  Taylor  had  strengthened  his  hold  on  the  northern 
provinces  of  Mexico.  In  September,  1846,  he  seized  the  im- 
portant town  of  Monterey,  the  capital  of  Nuevo  Leon,  after  a 
fierce  three  days'  battle  which  ended  in  a  fight  from  house  to 
house  through  the  streets  of  the  town.  In  the  next  few  months  he 
occupied  Saltillo  and  Victoria,  the  capitals  of  the  two  provinces 
flanking  Nuevo  Leon.  At  the  beginning  of  the  new  year  he  ^ 
held  a  line  of  200  miles  in  northern  Mexico  with  10,000  troops. 
Brave  in  battle  and  the  idol  of  his  men  for  his  "rough  and 
ready"  democracy,  Taylor  was  -nevertheless  lacking  in  many 
of  the  qualities  of  a  great  commander.  He_was  often  careless  in 
his  strategy,  reckless  in  his  tactics,  and  defiant  to  the  point 
of  insubordination  in  his  treatment  of  orders  from  the  War 
Department.  Against  any  other  opponent  than  the  cowardly 
Ampudia  his  operations  at  Monterey,  said  the  best  military 
critics,  would  have  resulted  in  disaster.  The  victories  of  1846 
on  the  Rio  Grande  and  in  the  Mexican  provinces  encouraged  him 
to  listen  with  increasing  attentiveness  to  the  suggestions  of  the 
Whig  politicians  that  he  would  be  a  strong  candidate  at  the  next 
presidential  election.  And  when,  in  November,  1846,  the  ad- 
ministration, against  his  advice,  decided  on  a  direct  march  on 
Mexico  City  by  way  of  Vera  Cruz  and  selected  General  Win- 
field  Scott  for  the  command,  Taylor  was  provoked  into  a  violent 
attack  on  Scott  and  the  War  Department.  He  had  been  de- 


430  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

prived  of  half  his  troops  and  left  with  only  a  few  thousand  "raw 
recruits/'  Scott  had  acted  in  "a  most  contemptible  manner" 
behind  his  back  to  supplant  him  in  command  and  "sacrifice" 
him  on  the  soil  of  Mexico.  The  adminfstration  had  slighted 
him  in  order  to  kill  his  chances  for  the  presidency.  On 
January  26,  1847,  Taylor  wrote  to  his  friend  Crittenden,  the 
Whig  senator  from  Kentucky,  announcing  his  candidacy  for 
the  presidential  nomination. 

The  reason  for  the  projected  campaign  against  the  Mexican 
capital  was  the  conviction  in  the  mind  of  Polk  that  only  a  bold 
stroke  at  the  heart  of  the  country  would  bring  Mexico  to  terms. 
Repeated  attempts  at  negotiation  had  failed.  In  spite  of  the 
rejection  of  Slidell,  Polk  had  again  approached  the  Mexican 
authorities  after  the  battles  on  the  Rio  Grande,  thinking  that 
Taylor's  victories  might  have  inclined  their  hearts  to  peace. 
But  disaster  at  a  distance  had  little  effect  on  the  factional  chiefs 
who  were  struggling  for  the  control  of  the  treasury  at  Mexico 
City  and  whose  most  effective  stock  in  trade  was  fervid  rhetor- 
ical denunciation  of  the  "cowardly  adventurers"  and  "rapa- 
cious invaders"  from  the"  Republic  of  the- North.  Buchanan's 
notes  were  treated  more  like  the  supplications  of  a  discouraged 
foe  than  the  conciliatory  advances  of  a  victor.  We  even  fished 
in  the  turbid  waters  of  Mexican  politics  in  the  hope  of  landing 
the  prize  of  peace.  Santa  Anna  had  been  driven  out  of  Mexico 
in  1845.  When  he  promised  from  his  exile  in  Cuba  that  he 
would  negotiate  terms  with  the  United  States  on  the  basis  of 
the  Rio  Grande  boundary  and  the  cession  of  Upper  California, 
Polk  ordered  Commodore  Connor,  our  commander  in  the  Gulf, 
to  let  him  pass  through  the  blockading  squadron.  Santa  Anna 
landed  at  Vera  Cruz  in  August,  1846,  and  soon  got  back  his 
power  in  the  distracted  republic.  But  he  found  the  war  spirit 
so  strong  that  he  renounced  the  unpopular  and  uncongenial 
task  of  attempting  to  close  the  gates  of  the  Temple  of  Janus. 
Instead,  he  put  himself  at  the  head  of  the  war  party,  made 
frenzied  appeals  for  a  supreme  effort  of  patriotism,  and  raised 
the  best  and  largest  army  that  Mexico  had  in  the  war — the 
"Army  of  Liberation."  "Every  day  that  passes  without  fighting 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  431 

at  the  North,"  he  cried,  "is  a  century  of  disgrace  for  Mexico." 
Early  in  January,  1847,  an  intercepted  letter  from  Scott  to 
Taylor  revealed  to  Santa  Anna  the  plans  of  the  Vera  Cruz 
expedition.  Knowing  that  Taylor's  forces  were  greatly  reduced, 
Santa  Anna  determined  to  drive  him  across  the  Rio  Grande 
before  Scott  could  strike  at  the  heart  of  Mexico.  As  Santa  Anna 
moved  northward  with  his  formidable  army  of  20,000  men, 
Taylor  concentrated  his  "raw  recruits"  to  secure  the  defenses  of 
Saltillo,  leaving  General  Wool  to  select  a  place  for  the  stand 
against  the  approaching  host.  Wool  chose  a  magnificent  defen- 
sive position  at  the  ranch  of  Buena  Vista — a  veritable  Pass  of 
Thermopylae.  And  here,  on  the  twenty-second  of  February,  with 
the  watchword  "Honor  of  Washington"  passing  down  the  Amer- 
ican line,  the  operations  began.  Santa  Anna's  superior  force 
enabled  him  to  gain  strong  positions  on  the  heights  flanking  the 
American  army.  The  situation  was  one  of  utmost  danger  to 
our  troops  when  the  main  battle  began  at  dawn  of  the  next  day. 
The  Mexicans,  certain  of  victory,  fought  with  all  the  impetu- 
ousness  that  exaltation  lends  to  courage.  Again  and  again  it 
seemed  as  if  the  American  army  of  less  than  5000  men  must 
be  swept  off  the  field.  Indeed,  the  first  reports  of  the  battle 
that  reached  Washington  were  that  our  army  was  routed.  But 
Taylor,  arriving  on  the  scene  from  Saltillo  about  the  middle  of 
the  morning,  was  worth  the  reenforcement  of  thousands  of 
troops.  Intrepid  and  imperturbable,  he  sat  in  his  saddle  on  the 
back  of  "Old  Whitey,"  directing  the  battle,  while  our  soldiers 
cheered  him  and  fought  like  demons.  Bragg,  Sherman,  Rey- 
nolds, Davis,  Thomas  (names  to  be  illustrious  in  our  Civil 
War77~with  Wool,  Hardin,  and  McKee,  performed  miracles. 
Finally  the  superiority  of  our  artillery  fire  prevailed  against  the 
masses  of  the  Mexican  infantry.  At  nightfall  Santa  Anna's 
army  withdrew,  leaving  their  pickets  and  camp  fires  to  indicate 
that  they  would  renew  the  battle  on  the  morrow.  But  when 
morning  came  the  exhausted  Americans,  springing  to  their  guns, 
saw  the  backs  of  their  retreating  foes.  Taylor  and  Wool  fell 
weeping  into  each  other's  arms.  It  was  a  glorious  victory  in 
the  face  of  tremendous  odds,  against  the  largest  army  that 


432  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

/  American  troops  had  ever  met.  And  it  made  Zachary  Taylor 
the  next  president  of  the  United  States. 

Meanwhile  Scott's  troops  were  being  conveyed  down  the 
stormy  waters  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  from  the  mouth  of  the 
Rio  Grande  to  a  point  near  Vera  Cruz.  They  landed  on 
March  g}  and  twenty  days  later  took  the  city.  Then  began  the 
romantic  march  up  through  the  mountains  to  the  city  of  Mexico. 
Scott  appealed,  not  without  success,  to  the  civilian  population 
to  remain  quietly  in  their  homes.  The  American  army,  he  said, 
had  come  to  deliver  them  from  the  misrule  of  the  unscrupulous 
politicians  who  had  brought  on  the  war.  Toward  the  people 
of  Mexico  it  had  only  the  most  friendly  disposition.  It  would 
respect  persons  and  property  and  pay  liberally  for  all  supplies 
furnished.  A  Mexican  force  of  13,000  men  under  Santa  Anna 
was  posted  on  the  heights  of  Cerro  Gordo,  commanding  the 
high  road.  Scott's  9000  drove  them  in  utter  rout  in  a  two  days' 
battle  (April  17-18),  capturing  3000  prisoners.  After  that  the 
prestige  of  the  Americans  was  so  great  that  they  were  opposed 
only  here  and  there  by  guerrilla  bands,  while  the  people  of  the 
towns  generally  welcomed  them  with  good-natured  curiosity 
and  the  hopes  of  unwonted  profits.  In  August,  Scott  reached 
the  outskirts  of  the  capital,  and  after  the  victories  of  Contreras 
and  Churubusco  against  the  troops  which  the  quarreling  factions 
of  politicians  had,  with  the  last  shame  of  desperation,  put  into 
the  field,  was  within  four  or  five  miles  of  the  gates  of  the  city. 

Here  Scott  paused  to  conclude  an  armistice  with  the  Mexican 
commander  while  another  attempt  at  negotiation  was  made. 
Nicholas  Trist,  chief  clerk  of  the  Department  of  State,  had 
arrived  at  Scott's  headquarters  in  May,  instructed  by  the 
President  "to  enter  into  arrangements  with  the  government  of 
Mexico  for  the  suspension  of  hostilities."  Scott  at  first  resented 
this  invasion  of  his  military  authority  and  charged  it  to  the 
President's  willingness  to  embarrass  his  Whig  generals.  For 
some  days  he  and  the  commissioner  were  not  on  speaking  terms. 
But  Scott  was  a  kindly,  generous  man,  without  guile ;  and  Trist 
was  tactful  and  courteous.  Before  the  end  of  June  the  two  were 
the  best  of  friends.  Trist  had  considerable  latitude  in  his  in- 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  433 

structions  in  regard  to  the  compensation  which  he  might  offer 
Mexico,  but  he  was  to  insist  on  our. retention  of  Texas,  New 
Mexico,  and  California.  When  the  Mexican  counterproposals 
refused  to  cede  us  any  part  of  New  Mexico  or  California,  set 
the  boundary  of  Texas  at  the  Nueces,  and  demanded  that  we 
pay  the  cost  of  the  war  and  recompense  the  Mexicans  for  their 
"ruined  fortunes," — terms  that  a  conqueror  might  have  im- 
posed,— there  was  no  way  left  but  to  prosecute  the  war  to  an 
end.  Santa  Anna  broke  the  armistice  by  strengthening  the  de- 
fenses of  the  city  and  cutting  off  American  supplies.  Then  Scott 
closed  in  upon  him.  On  September  8  he  drove  the  Mexicans 
from  Molino  del  Rey,  and  five  days  later  stormed  the  high  rock 
fort  of  Chapul tepee.  The  Mexican  troops  in  the  city  fled  to 
Guadalupe-Hidalgo  as  the  city  council  sent  offers  of  capitulation 
to  the  American  headquarters.  At  dawn  of  September  14  our 
troops,  "  decorated  with  mud,  the  red  stains  of  battle,  and  rough 
bandages,"  entered  the  gates.  Marching  to  the  Plaza  between 
"  sidewalks,  windows,  balconies,  and  housetops  crowded  with 
people,"  they  raised  a  battle-torn  American  flag  above  the  pal- 
ace, while  General  Scott  strode  up  the  stairway  of  the  "  Halls 
of  the  Montezumas"  to  write  the  dispatch  of  victory. 

The  fall  of  the  capital  eliminated  Santa  Anna  (the  curse  of 
Mexico  for  a  score  of  years)  and  brought  to  power  a  gov- 
ernment desirous  of  peace.  Trist  had  already  been  recalled 
by  an  administration  determined  at  last  to  deal  harshly  with 
Mexico.  But  he  stayed,  counter  to  his  orders,  and  made  peace 
with  Mexican  commissioners  at  Guadalupe-Hidalgo  on  the  basis 
of  his  former  instructions.  Mexico  acknowledged  our  title  to 
Texas,  New  Mexico,  and  Upper  California,  and  in  return  we 
paid  Mexico  $15,000,000  and  assumed  claims  of  our  citizens 
agamsfthe  Mexican  government  up  to  $3,250,000.  Some  mem- 
bers of  the  cabinet,  including  Secretary  of  State  Buchanan, 
were  in  favor  of  taking  a  part  of  Mexico  itself,  but  Polk  held 
firmly  io  the  line  of  the  Rio  Grande.  In  the  Senate  the  treaty 
of  Guadalupe-Hidalgo  was  opposed  by  those  who  wanted  no 
territory,  those  who  wanted  more  territory,  and  those  who  were 
chagrined  that  Polk  should  finish  up  his  program  so  success- 


434  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

fully  at  the  opening  of  a  presidential  year.  Nevertheless,  the 
treaty  was  ratified  on  March  10,  1848,  by  the  narrow  margin 
of  38  to  14.  A  change  of  four  votes  would  have  defeated  it. 
The  Mexican  War  has  been  generally  condemned  by  our 
historians  as  a  blot  on  the  honor  of  the  country — a  war  pro- 
moted by  the  slavery  interests,  precipitated  by  an  aggres- 
sive president,  and  prosecuted  with  a  conqueror's  ruthlessness. 
But  this  persistent  attitude  seems  to  rest  rather  on  prejudices 
derived  from  the  political  situation  of  the  time  than  on  a  dis- 
passionate judgment  of  the  documents.  The  abolitionists  car- 
ried over  their  indignation  at  the  annexation  of  Texas  into  a 
denunciation  of  every  move  of  the  United  States  in  the  war, 
and  even  into  a  mawkish  approbation  of  Mexico's  "virtue, 
courage,  and  fortitude  under  the  most  disastrous  circumstances." 
Lowell's  immortal  "Biglow  Papers"  not  only  ridiculed  our  army 
and  counseled  resistance  to  enlistment  but  even  contemplated 
disunion  with  apparent  equanimity.  The  expansionist  senti- 
ment was  "half  of  it  ignorance  and  t'other  half  rum";  its 
object,  only  "bigger  pens  to  cram  with  slaves." 

They  jest  want  this  Californy 
So's  to  lug  new  slave  states  in 

was  Lowell's  interpretation ;  but  the  fact  was  that  when  Cali- 
fornia framed  her  constitution  in  1849  not  a  single  delegate 
voted  for  slavery,  and  there  never  was  a  moment  of  danger  that 
California  would  enter  the  Union  as  a  slave  state. 

Whig  orators  in  Congress  hoped  that  the  Mexicans  would 
welcome  our  soldiers  to  "hospitable  graves."  Whig  newspapers 
declared  that  "every  heart  worthy  of  American  liberty  had 
an  impulse  to  join  the  Mexicans,"  and  that  it  would  be  "a 
joy  to  hear  that  the  hordes  under  Scott  and  Taylor  were 
every  man  of  them  swept  into  the  next  world."  Although  Con- 
gress had  sanctioned  our  occupation  of  the  region  beyond  the 
Nueces  by  the  establishment  of  customs  laws  there  and  had 
supported  the  President's  war  message  in  both  Houses  by  tre- 
mendous majorities,  Webster  had  the  effrontery,  in  a  speech  in 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  435 

Faneuil  Hall  in  Boston,  to  threaten  Polk  with  impeachment 
for  involving  the  country  in  war  without  the  consent  of  Con- 
gress. The  truth  is  that  all  the  denunciation  of  the  war  that 
was  not  honest  abolitionisll)pposition  was  J^E^^ntTcsT  And 
the  only  comment  necessary  on  the  honesty  of  the  Whig's 
"pacifism"  is  that  they  exploited  the  most  popular  of  the 
victorious  generals  of  the  war  in  their  presidential  campaign 
of  1848.  They  pretended  that  they  did  not  want  the  United 
States  to  beat  Mexico,  but  what  they  really  meant  was  that 
they  did  not  want  Polk's  administration  to  beat  Mexico. 
"Clay,  Webster,  and  the  other  Whigs,"  wrote  Markoe  from 
Vera  Cruz,  "have  by  their  speeches  done  more  to  prevent  peace 
than  as  though  they  had  arrayed  10,000  Mexicans  against 
Scott."  "Mexican  Whigs"  was  the  not  inappropriate  epithet 
bestowed  upon  them.1 

To  contend  that  the  Mexican  War  was  not  dishonorable, 
however,  is  not  to  deny  that  it  was  unfortunate.  It  is  possible 
that  a  man  of  greater  tact  and  patience  than  Polk  in  the  White 
House  could  have  kept  the  sentiment  of  expansion  within  the 
bounds  of  peace.  It  is  possible  that  the  vicissitudes  of  Mexican 
politics  might  have  brought  into  power  an  administration  from 
which  we  could  have  got  by  purchase  what  we  took  by  arms. 
It  is  possible  that  more  friendly  relations  with  Great  Britain 
would  have  removed  what  we  believed  to  be  a  necessity  for 
acting  promptly  and  decisively.  But  all  these  are  only  pos- 
sibilities. What  is  certain  is  that  no  great  part  of  the  American 
people  realized  at  the  time  that  the  prize  of  the  Western  lands 
over  which  their  explorers  and  pathfinders  had  marched,  and 
which  beckoned  with  the  promise  of  a  new  empire  for  democ- 
racy, would  turn  to  ashes  in  the  acquisition.  The  one  and  only 
recompense  of  war  is  that  it  unites  a  people  more  firmly  in 

1  Justin  H.  Smith,  in  his  exhaustive  and  judicious  volumes  on  "The  War  with 
Mexico,"  sums  up  the  behavior  of  the  Whigs  in  a  single  pithy  sentence :  "  They 
denounced  the  war  enough  to  incriminate  themselves  when  they  supported  it, 
and  they  supported  it  enough  to  stultify  themselves  when  they  condemned  it" 
(Vol.  II,  p.  283). 


436  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

devotion  to  the  highest  national  ideals.    But  the  Mexican  War 
was  the  harbinger  of  naught  but  strife  and  discord.1 

The  platform  on  which  Polk  was  elected  in  1844  called  for 
the  "  reoccupation "  of  Oregon  as  well  as  the  "reannexation" 
of  Texas.  Oregon  (see  map,  p.  319)  comprised  the  vast  ter- 
ritory west  of  the  Rocky  Mountains  between  the  parallels  of 
42°  (Spain's  northern  boundary  by  the  treaty  of  1819)  and  54° 
40'  (Russia's  southern  boundary  by  the  treaty  of  1824).  Since 
1818  it  had  been  held  in  joint  occupation  with  Great  Britain, 
the  renewal  of  the  agreement  in  1827  giving  either  party  the 
right  to  terminate  it  on  a  year's  notice  to  the  other.  Both  the 
United  States  and  Great  Britain  had  claims  to  Oregon  reaching 
back  to  the  eighteenth  century.  In  1792  Captain  Gray  of  Boston 
had  sailed  into  the  mouth  of  the  river  which  he  named,  after 
his  ship,  the  "Columbia."  Lewis  and  Clark  had  traversed  the 
Oregon  region,  wintering  on  the  Pacific  coast  in  1805.  Six 
years  later  John  Jacob  Astor  had  established  the  fur  post  of 
Astoria.  The  British  had  secured  trading-rights  on  the  Oregon 
coast  from  Spain,  in  the  Nootka  Sound  convention  of  1790, 
and  the  Hudson's  Bay  Company  had  extended  its  fortified 
posts  down  into  the  Columbia  valley.  We  took  little  inter- 
est in  the  distant  region  of  Oregon  until  the  missionaries,  fol- 
lowing in  the  track  of  the  explorers  and  the  fur-traders,  in 
the  early  thirties  began  to  appeal  to  the  East  for  support. 
A  few  enthusiasts  like  Nathaniel  Wyeth,  the  Lee  brothers, 
and  Marcus  Whitman2  started  a  publicity  campaign  to  secure 
immigration  to  the  region.  But  the  response  was  slow.  By  the 
end  of  1841  not  more  than  500  American  settlers  had  gone  to 
the  Oregon  country. 

1  William  H.  Seward  prophesied  of  the  whole  annexation  policy  that  it  would 
give  to  the  slave  interests  "  a  fearful  preponderance  which  may  and  probably  will 
be  speedily  followed  by  demands  to  which  the  democratic,  free  labor  states  can- 
not yield  ;  and  the  denial  of  which  will  be  made  the  ground  of  secession,  nullifi- 
cation, and  disunion." 

2 Until  it  was  exposed  in  1900  by  Professor  E.  G.  Bourne,  in  the  American 
Historical  Review  (Vol.  VI,  pp.  276-300),  the  legend  of  Marcus  Whitman  was  a 
firm  and  cherished  tradition  of  American  history.  According  to  that  legend, 
Whitman,  hearing  at  a  dinner  at  one  of  the  fur  posts  of  the  intention  of  the 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  437 

The  wave  of  expansionist  sentiment  which  brought  Texas 
into  the  Union  stimulated  migration  to  Oregon.  Senators 
Benton  and  Linn  of  Missouri  were  especially  active  to  secure 
legislation  to  encourage  the  settlement  of  the  Far  Northwest. 
Linn's  bill  providing  for  a  line  of  forts  from  the  Missouri  River 
to  the  best  pass  over  the  Rockies,  and  the  grant  of  a  section 
of  land  to  each  immigrant  over  eighteen  years  of  age,  went 
through  the  Senate  in  February,  1843.  Although  it  failed  in 
the  House,  the  discussion  that  it  raised  and  the  expectation  of 
its  becoming  a  law  started  a  large  emigration  to  Oregon.  In 
June,  for  example,  a  caravan  of  nearly  900  settlers,  in  200 
wagons,  with  1300  head  of  cattle,  started  on  a  successful  jour- 
ney across  the  Rockies.  Other  parties  followed,  swelling  the 
immigrants  to  several  thousands.  The  settlers  in  Oregon  had 
already  begun  to  take  measures  for  their  .political  protection. 
Organizing  a  provisional  government,  they  petitioned  Con- 
gress to  extend  the  laws  of  the  United  States  over  their  region. 
Enthusiastic  conventions  in  the  Middle  States  demanded  that 
we  should  assert  the  Monroe  Doctrine  against  Great  Britain, 
build  forts  from  the  Missouri  to  the  Pacific,  and  take  possession 
of  the  whole  of  Oregon  up  to  the  boundary  of  Alaska  (54°  40'). 
"Fifty-four  forty  or  fight!"  the  slogan. 

This  demand  of  the  enthusiasts  for  "all  of  Oregon  or  none" 
had  no  sound  basis.  We  had,  since  1824,  repeatedly  discussed 
with  Great  Britain  the  division  of  the  territory  and  had  always 
professed  ourselves  satisfied  with  the  extension  of  the  line  of 
49°  to  the  Pacific.  Great  Britain,  however,  insisted  on  the 
Columbia  as  her  southern  boundary,  with  the  free  navigation 
of  the  river  for  both  countries.  Even  as  late  as  July,  1845 
(after  having  asserted  in  his  inaugural  address  of  March  4  that 
"our  title  to  the  country  of  Oregon  is  clear  and  unquestion- 

British  to  occupy  the  region  of  Oregon  south  of  the  Columbia,  mounted  his  horse 
and  made  a  midwinter  ride  of  4000  miles  across  the  continent  to  implore  Tyler 
and  Webster  in  the  White  House  to  "save  Oregon."  Whitman  did  cross  the  con- 
tinent to  get  aid  for  his  mission  station  from  the  American  Board  of  Foreign 
Missions  in  Boston,  but  he  never  held  the  dramatic  interview  with  the  President 
and  the  Secretary  of  State  in  which  he  implored  them  not  to  "sacrifice  Oregon 
for  a  cod  fishery." 


438  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

able"),  Polk  renewed  the  offer  of  the  line  of  49°  to  the  British 
minister — only  to  be  repulsed.  In  April,  1846,  both  Houses  of 
Congress  by  large  majorities  (142  to  46,  and  42  to  10)  author- 
ized Polk  to  give  the  year's  notice  to  Great  Britain  of  the 
termination  of  the  joint  agreement  of  1827.  It  was  on  the  day 
after  this  vote  that  Captain  Thornton's  dragoons  were  attacked 
on  the  Rio  Grande  (p.  424).  The  President  had  no  intention, 
in  spite  of  the  campaign  bluster  of  "Fifty-four  forty  or  fight" 
and  his  own  bold  words  in  the  inaugural,  of  going  to  war  with 
Great  Britain  over  a  few  degrees  of  latitude  in  Oregon,  when  a 
war  with  Mexico  was  imminent.  He  let  the  British  ministry 
know  that  a  proposal  from  them  would  be  welcome,  and  when 
they  sent  over  the  draft  of  the  treaty  accepting  the  line  of  49°, 
he  accepted  it  on  the  advice  of  the  Senate  (June  10,  I846).1 
Benton  charged  the  administration  with  bullying  tactics: 
the  reason  why  we  did  not  march  up  to  the  line  54°  40'  with 
the  same  boldness  that  we  marched  down  to  the  Rio  Grande 
was  that  England  was  a  strong  power  and  Mexico  a  weak 
one.  And  since  Benton's  day  this  opinion  has  been  frequently 
repeated  by  our  historians.2  The  facts,  however,  do  not  sup- 
port it.  Polk  worked  far  harder  to  induce  the  Mexican  govern- 
ment to  agree  to  a  peaceful  settlement  than  he  did  to  conciliate 
Great  Britain.  If  we  did  not  march  up  to  54°  40'  it  was  cer- 
tainly partly  because  we  had  no  shadow  of  a  claim  to  the 

1  The  boundary  as  provided  by  the  treaty  followed  the  4Qth  parallel  westward 
from  the  Rockies  to  Puget  Sound,  and  thence  ran  through  the  middle  of  the  chan- 
nel'to  the  Pacific.  Great  Britain  was  to  have  the  whole  of  Vancouver  Island  with 
the  free  navigation  of  the  Columbia.  The  Hudson's  Bay  Company  was  to  receive 
$650,000.  A  dispute  over  the  exact  location  of  the  boundary  through  the  Sound 
was  referred  to  the  German  Emperor  for  arbitration  in  1871  and  was  decided  in 
favor  of  our  claims. 

2 "With  England  which  was  strong  we  were  ready  to  compound  differences; 
from  Mexico  which  was  weak  we  were  disposed  to  snatch  everything"  (Wood- 
row  Wilson,  "Division  and  Reunion,"  p.  149).  "Negotiation  in  the  same  spirit 
as  that  had  with  Great  Britain  would  undoubtedly  have  settled  the  difficulty,  but 
the  President  arrogated  the  right  of  deciding.  .  .  .  Mexico  was  actually  goaded 
into  the  war"  (Rhodes,  Vol.  I,  p.  87).  Not  to  mention  extremists  like  Schouler, 
who  speaks  of  our  "profligate  contempt  of  Mexico's  rights  of  sovereignty"  and 
of  our  "repeating  the  story  of  Pizarro,  only  with  shabbier  embellishments" 
(Vol.V,  p.  443). 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  439 

boundary  of  54°  40'.  We  had  repeatedly  offered  the  line  of  49° 
ourselves.  If  we  did  not  go  to  war  with  Great  Britain  as  we 
did  with  Mexico  it  was  due  partially  to  the  fact  that  Great 
Britain  was  civilized,  reliable,  and  reasonable.  She  neither 
rejected  our  envoys  nor  insulted  our  government.  On  a  hint 
from  Washington  her  ministry  sent  us  a  treaty  conceding  the 
boundaries  which  we  fairly  claimed.  While  the  Mexicans  were 
clamoring  for  war  to  drive  our  armies  from  a  state  of  our 
Union,  the  British  were  but  restraining  us  from  invading  a  ter- 
ritory which  we  had  never  pretended  to  occupy.  The  relative 
strength  of  Great  Britain  and  Mexico  had  nothing  to  do  with 
the  merits  of  the  case. 

The  Mexican  War  had  been  in  progress  only  three  months 
when  President  Polk  asked  Congress  (August  3,  1846)  for  an 
appropriation  of  $2,000,000  to  help  secure  our  boundary  from 
Mexico.  It  was  certain  that  a  large  transfer  of  territory  from 
Mexico  to  the  United  States  would  be  the  first  condition  of 
peace.  Stockton  had  already  raised  the  American  flag  over 
the  Californian  town  of  Monterey ;  Kearny  was  but  a  few  days' 
march  from  Santa  Fe  in  New  Mexico  (see  page  426).  The  ad- 
vocates of  the  restriction  of  slavery  got  David  Wilmot,  a  Demo- 
cratic congressman  from  Pennsylvania,  to  offer  an  amendment 
to  the  $2,000,000  bill  to  the  effect  that  "neither  slavery  nor 
involuntary  servitude  [should]  ever  exist  in  any  part  of  the 
territory"  acquired  from  Mexico.  The  bill,  including  the  Wil- 
mot Proviso,  as  the  amendment  was  called,  passed  the  House 
(87  to  64),  but  failed  in  the  Senate  because  the  hour  agreed 
upon  with  the  House  for  the  adjournment  of  the  session  over- 
took Senator  Davis  of  Massachusetts  while  he  was  arguing 
against  a  motion  to  strike  out  the  amendment.  When  Congress 
met  again  in  December,  1846,  the  bill  was  reintroduced,  and 
again  the  House  voted  to  incorporate  the  Wilmot  Proviso  (115 
to  105) .  The  Senate  rejected  the  Proviso  by  a  vote  of  31  to  2 1 x 

1Six  of  the  votes  of  the  majority  came  from  senators  of  Northern  states.  If 
these  six  men  had  supported  the  Proviso  it  would  have  passed  by  a  vote  of  27 
to  25,  and,  unless  vetoed  by  Polk,  the  bill  excluding  slavery  from  the  newly  won 
territory  of  the  United  States  would  have  become  a  law  in  1847. 


440  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

and  on  the  last  day  of  the  session  secured  the  consent  of  the 
House  to  the  unamended  bill.  Although  the  Wilmot  Proviso 
failed  in  1847,  ft  was  revived  in  the  House  again  and  again 
in  the  two  years  following,  and  it  remained  before  the  country 
as  the  official  demand  of  the  liberty  men  of  the  North.  Abraham 
Lincoln,  who  was  a  member  of  Congress  from  1847  to  1849, 
said  that  he  voted  for  the  Proviso  in  the  House  more  than 
forty  times. 

The  persistence  of  the  advocates  of  the  Wilmot  Proviso 
aroused  equal  insistence  on  the  part  of  Calhoun,  Davis,  and 
other  Southern  leaders  that  no  restriction  of  slavery  in  the  new 
territory  should  be  allowed  by  Congress.  Oregon  was  anxiously 
waiting  for  territorial  organization  in  the  summer  of  1846,  and 
President  Polk  urged  in  his  messages  of  August  and  December 
that  Congress  proceed  to  the  task.  But  when  the  House  passed 
a  bill  which  extended  the  antislavery  provision  of  the  Northwest 
Ordinance  to  Oregon  (January  16,  1847),  the  Senate  tabled  it. 
There  was  no  intention  in  the  mind  of  the  Southern  senators  of 
carrying  slavery  into  Oregon.  What  they  objected  to  in  the  bill 
was  the  power  of  Congress  to  exclude  slavery  from  Oregon. 
When  the  ratification  of  the  treaty  of  Guadalupe-Hidalgo  in  the 
summer  of  1848  made  New  Mexico  and  California  American  soil, 
Polk  urged  the  prompt  organization  of  a  territorial  government 
for  these  provinces  also.  An  attempt  was  made  to  settle  the 
whole  matter  by  the  so-called  Clayton  Compromise  of  July, 
1848,  according  to  which  Oregon  was  to  have  complete  ter- 
ritorial government  with  representation  in  Congress,  while  Cali- 
fornia and  New  Mexico  were  to  be  administered  by  a  governor, 
a  secretary,  and  judges  of  the  Supreme  Court.  The  question  of 
slavery  was  left  to  the  Oregon  legislature,  but  the  governments 
of  New  Mexico  and  California  were  forbidden  to  pass  any  laws 
"respecting  the  prohibition  or  establishment  of  African  slavery 
— such  being  referred  to  the  United  States  courts."1  This 
measure  the  Senate  passed  after  an  all-night  battle  (July  27), 
but  the  House  tabled  it.  Finally,  in  August,  1848,  the  Senate 

1Corwin  wittily  said  of  this  measure  that  it  would  be  "enacting  not  a  law 
but  a  lawsuit." 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  441 

so  far  receded  from  its  position  as  to  sanction  the  bill  for  the 
organization  of  Oregon,  including  the  restriction  of  slavery. 
But  California  and  New  Mexico  still  remained  unorganized. 

Meantime  the  presidential  campaign  was  in  full  swing.  The 
Democratic  convention,  meeting  at  Baltimore  on  May  22,  had 
nominated  Governor  Lewis  Cass  of  Michigan,  an  ardent  union- 
ist and  expansionist,  confident,  ornate,  with  pretensions  to  dip- 
lomatic and  military  distinction.  Cass  was  reputed  "a  northern 
man  with  southern  principles" — popularly  known  as  a  "dough- 
face." The  platform  defended  the  Mexican  War  as  "just  and 
necessary,"  and  denied  the  power  of  Congress  to  interfere  with 
the  domestic  institutions  of  the  states.  Every  attempt  in  the 
convention  to  discuss  the  Wilmot  Proviso  was  met  with  calls 
to  order.  The  Whigs  met  at  Philadelphia,  June  7.  In  spite  of 
their  fervid  condemnation  of  the  war,  they  nominated  the  hero 
of  Palo  Alto  and  Buena  Vista,  whom  they  had  been  "groom- 
ing" for  the  presidency  for  a  year  or  more.  There  were  decided 
objections  to  Taylor  as  the  candidate  of  a  party  which  prided 
itself  on  "principles."  When  asked  his  opinions  on  the  Bank 
and  the  tariff,  he  replied  with  his  bluff  honesty  that  he  had  "had 
no  time  to  investigate"  them.  He  was  a  Louisiana  planter  with 
three  hundred  slaves.  He  had  never  voted,  but  in  a  private 
letter  he  said  that  he  "certainly  would  have  voted  for  Clay" 
in  1844.  However,  these  political  shortcomings  were  all  atoned 
for  by  his  popularity  as  a  military  hero.  The  Whigs  simply  had 
to  win.  They  shunned  the  danger  of  faction  and  defection  by 
refusing  to  adopt  any  platform  or  declaration  of  principles. 
When  the  Ohio  delegation  attempted  to  introduce  the  Wilmot 
Proviso  they  were  rebuked. 

The  New  York  Democrats  were  divided  into  the  factions  of 
"Barnburners"  and  "Hunkers,"  the  former  an  antiadministra- 
tion^roupTunder  the  feacTof  Van  Buren,  with  leanings  toward 
the  Wilmot  Proviso.  A  convention  of  the  Barnburners,  joined 
by  delegates  from  Massachusetts,  Ohio,  Connecticut,  and  Wis- 
consin, met  at  Utica,  New  York,  in  June,  and  nominated  Van 
Buren  for  president.  He  was  also  nominated  in  August  by  the 
convention  of  the  new  Free  Soil  party,  which  met  at  Buffalo, 


442  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

attended  by  65  delegates  from  18  states.  Their  platform  de- 
manded that  Congress  should  neither  erect  another  slave  ter- 
ritory nor  admit  another  slave  state.  It  declared  that  the  party 
would  "  fight  on  and  fight  ever"  under  the  banner  inscribed 
"Free  soil,  free  speech,  free  labor,  free  men,"  until  "triumphant 
victory"  should  reward  its  exertions.  The  old  Liberty  (Abo- 
litionist) party  merged  with  the  Free-Soilers,  its  candidate, 
J.  P.  Hale,  withdrawing  in  favor  of  Van  Buren.  The  coalition 
of  the  Barnburners  and  the  Free-Soilers  was  strong  enough  to 
defeat  the  regular  Democratic  candidate  in  the  pivotal  state  of 
New  York  and  to  give  the  36  electoral  votes  of  that  state,  and 
therewith  the  election,  to  General  Taylor.1  In  Congress  too  the 
Free-Soilers  won  a  commanding  position,  their  13  members 
holding  the  balance  of  power  between  the  112  Democrats  and 
the  105  Whigs. 

Yet  the  election  as  a  whole  was  without  significance.  It 
marked  rather  a  dead  center  in  the  revolution  of  political  events. 
The  old  issues  of  Bank,  tariff,  currency,  internal  improvements, 
were  worn  threadbare.  The  lines  of  the  new  struggle  over 
slavery  and  the  territories  were  not  yet  clearly  drawn.  Each 
party  was  looking  for  votes  wherever  they  could  be  found  —  the 
Whigs  with  a  Southern  slaveholder  whose  military  record  com- 
mended him  to  the  North;  the  Democrats  with  a  Northern 
frontiersman  whose  views  on  slavery  were  not  offensive  to  the 
South.  Taylor  carried  seven  free  states  and  eight  slave  states  ; 
Cass  carried  eight  free  states  and  seven  slave  states.  The 
separation  of  the  sections  and  the  disruption  of  the  old  parties 
had  not  yet  come.  The  election  of  1848  was,  as  Garrison  truly 
says,  "a  contest_without  an  issue."* 


popular  vote  in  New  York  was  218,000  for  Taylor,  120,000  for  Van 
Buren,  and  114,000  for  Cass.  In  the  electoral  college  Taylor  had  163  votes  to 
127  for  Cass. 

2  Although  the  annexation  of  Texas,  the  Mexican  War,  the  Oregon  settlement, 
and  the  rising  controversy  over  slavery  in  the  territories  absorb  the  attention  of 
the  historical  student  in  the  middle  years  of  the  decade  1840-1850,  there  are 
a  number  of  interesting  facts  of  secondary  importance  in  politics  and  civics 
that  may  be  recorded  here:  (i)  By  an  act  of  June  25,  1842,  the  "general 
ticket"  was  done  away  with  for  congressional  elections,  and  each  member  was 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  443 

THE  COMPROMISE  OF  1850 

National  conventions  might  dodge  the  issue  of  slavery,  crying 
"  Avaunt  and  quit  my  sight !  "  to  the  Wilmot  Proviso,  which  rose 
with  the  persistency  of  Banquo's  ghost  before  their  eyes ;  Con- 
gress might  adjourn,  leaving  the  increasing  population  of  New 
Mexico  and  California  without  a  government;  the  new  presi- 
dent, in  his  first  inaugural  message,  might  deprecate  "the 
introduction  of  those  exciting  topics  of  a  sectional  character 
which  have  hitherto  produced  painful  apprehensions  in  the 
public  mind," — but  all  this  was  as  futile  as  King  Canute's 
injunction  to  the  rising  tide.  The  people  at  large  were  convinced 
that  a  crisis  was  at  hand  in  the~  slavery  question  and  that  it  must 
be  met.  Our  country  threatened  to  separate  into  warring  fac- 
tions. The  very  protestations  of  orators  North  and  South  in 
their  utter  devotion  to  our  priceless  Union  show  how  great  the 
danger  to  that  Union  was. 

At  the  North  the  principle  of  the  Wilmot  Proviso  was  gain- 
ing converts  with  each  rejection  by  Congress.  Its  advocates 
were  determined  that  the  acquisitions  of  the  Mexican  War 
should  bring  no  profit  to  slavery.  The  abolitionists  redoubled 
their  efforts,  planting  new  societies,  establishing  newspapers  and 
debating  clubs,  and  circulating  a  great  amount  of  propagandist 
literature  and  pictures.  Legislatures  and  conventions  in  the 
free  states  passed  scores  of  resolutions  upholding  the  Proviso, 
and  petitions  for  its  adoption  poured  in  upon  Congress  in  an 
unbroken  stream.  The  South  was  equally  firm  in  its  opposition. 

returned  to  the  House  from  a  single  congressional  district.  (2)  In  1844  the 
electric  telegraph  was  first  used  to  report  the  proceedings  of  the  national  con- 
vention, and  Silas  Wright  of  New  York  had  the  unique  experience  of  declining 
the  presidential  nomination  when  it  was  offered  to  him.  (3)  By  an  act  of  Jan- 
uary 23,  1845,  a  uniform  day — the  first  Tuesday  after  the  first  Monday  in 
November — was  prescribed  for  the  choosing  of  presidential  electors.  (4)  In 
March,  1845,  both  Houses  of  Congress  for  the  first  time  passed  a  bill  over  the 
president's  veto.  (5)  On  March  3,  1845,  Iowa  and  Florida  were  authorized  to 
frame  constitutions  for  admission  to  the  Union.  (6)  The  Walker  tariff  of  1846 
began  the  series  of  relatively  low  tariff  rates  which  lasted  until  the  Civil  War. 
(7)  In  August,  1846,  the  Independent  Treasury  system,  which  also  lasted  until 
the  Civil  War,  was  reestablished. 


444  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

An  address  was  drawn  up  by  Calhoun  and  signed  by  48  members 
of  Congress,  demanding  that  abolitionist  agitation  should  cease, 
that  fugitive  slaves  be  returned  to  their  masters,  and  that  the 
new  territory  be  freely  opened  to  the  emigration  of  the  slave- 
holders. A  mass  meeting  held  in  Kentucky  requested  Henry 
Clay  to  resign  his  seat  in  the  Senate,  because  he  had  written  a 
letter  recommending  a  plan  of  gradual  emancipation  for  the 
slaves  of  the  state.  Resolutions  voted  by  a  large  majority  in  the 
legislature  of  Virginia  declared  that  in  the  case  of  the  adop- 
tion and  attempted  enforcement  of  the  Wilmot  Proviso  "the 
sovereign  people  of  Virginia"  would  not  hesitate  in  the  choice 
between  "abject  submission  to  aggression  and  outrage"  and 
/'determined  resistance  at  all  hazards  and  to  the  last  extremity." 
The  toast  "a  Southern  confederacy"  was  hailed  with  cheers  at 
a  dinner  to  Senator  Butler  of  South  Carolina  in  April,  1849.  As 
usual  in  times  of  great  crises,  the  influence  of  the  radicals  on 
both  sides  tended  to  carry  along  the  majority  of  the  moderates, 
who  in  the  North  feared  the  reproach  of  favoring  secession  and 
in  the  South  abhorred  the  suspicion  of  condoning  abolition. 

When  Folk's  final  Congress  adjourned  in  the  spring  of  1849 
without  having  made  any  provision  for  the  government  of  the 
territory  acquired  from  Mexico,  Senator  Benton  advised  the 
Californians  to  form  a  government  for  themselves.  There  was 
pressing  need  for  such  action.  Gold  had  been  discovered  in 
the  Sacramento  valley  in  January,  1848,  and  the  next  year  saw 
the  swarming  of  the  "forty-niners "  into  California.  Thousands 
came  by  wagon  across  the  great  plains  of  the  West,  braving  star- 
vation, exhaustion,  the  fever  of  the  alkali  wastes,  and  the  danger 
of  Indian  attacks  and  leaving  their  telltale  track  of  broken 
wagons,  dead  animals,  and  human  bones.  Other  thousands 
came  by  sea,  enduring  the  perils  and  buffetings  of  the  six 
months'  voyage  around  Cape  Horn,  the  mariners'  Nemesis,  or 
crossing  the  pestilence-laden  Isthmus  of  Panama  on  pack  mules, 
to  battle  like  crazy  men  for  a  place  on  the  dirty,  crowded,  rick- 
ety steamers  plying  up  the  Calif ornian  coast.  Mexicans,  South 
Americans,  Germans,  Englishmen,  Frenchmen,  and  Chinamen 
rushed  to  the  "diggings."  Men  fought  over  disputed  claims 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  445 

with  revolver  and  bowie  knife.  Bandits  plundered  the  convoys, 
Indians  raided  the  settlements,  and  drunken  ruffians  terrorized 
the  camps.  There  was  no  law  or  order.  As  the  American  immi- 
grants gained  in  number  over  the  "greasers"  and  the  yellow  men 
they  determined  to  hold  a  convention  for  the  'establishment  of  a 
civil  government.  The  convention  met  at  Monterey,  Septem- 
ber 3,  1849,  and  framed  a  state  constitution,  excluding  slavery 
by  a  unanimous  vote,  although  one  third  of  the  members  were 
from  the  Southern  states.  When  Congress  met  in  December, 
California,  its  population  grown  from  6000  to  over  80,000,  was 
asking  admission  to  the  Union  as  a  free  state.  The  people  of 
New  Mexico,  meanwhile,  had  petitioned  for  organization  as  a 
non-slaveholding  territory,  claiming  land  to  the  east  of  the 
Rio  Grande  over  which  Texas  had  extended  her  authority. 

President  Taylor,  although  a  Southerner  and  a  slaveowner, 
became  convinced  on  a  visit  to  the  New  England  states  in  the 
summer  of  1849  that  the  South  was  the  aggressor.  He  met 
the  threats  from  South  Carolina,  Virginia,  and  Mississippi  in  the 
spirit  of  Andrew  Jackson.  He  would  answer  the  first  overt  act 
with  a  blockade  of  the  Southern  ports  and  call  for  volunteers 
from  the  free  states.  If  necessary,  he  said*,  he  "would  pour  out 
his  blood  for  the  defense  of  the  Union."  He  was  much  under 
the  influence  of  Senator  Seward  of  New  York,  the  leader  of 
the  antislavery  Whigs.  While  not  an  advocate  of  the  Wilmot 
Proviso  himself,  the  President  let  it  be  known  that  he  would 
do  nothing  to  encourage  the  program  of  the  Southern  radicals. 
"The  people  of  the  North/'  he  said  in  a  speech  in  Pennsylvania, 
in  August,  1849,  "need  have  no  apprehension  of  the  further 
extension  of  slavery."  His  own  plan  was  to  admit  California 
at  once  as  a  free  state  and  establish  territorial  governments  in 
New  Mexico  and  Deseret  (Utah)  without  any  provision  re- 
garding  slavery,  leaving  the  people  the  choice  when  they  should 
blFTeady  for  statehood. 

The  latter  doctrine  was  known  as  "popular  sovereignty," 
later  nicknamed  "squatter  sovereignty/'  because  it  left  the  for- 
mation of  communities  with  or  without  slavery  to  the  people  who 
"squatted,"  or  settled,  on  the  land  while  it  was  still  the  public 


446  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

territory  of  the  nation,  without  the  power  of  a  state  to  deter- 
mine its  municipal  law  by  a  regular  constitution.  The  origin 
of  the  doctrine  is  generally  ascribed  to  Lewis  Cass,  who  elabo- 
rated it  in  a  letter  to  a  certain  Mr.  Nicholson  of  Nashville  in 
December,  1847; -but  tne  principle  had  .been  discussed  two 
years  earlier  in  connection  with  the  admission  of  the  territory 
of  Florida  to  statehood.  Other  possible  solutions  for  the  treat- 
ment of  the  territory  acquired  from  Mexico  were  (i)  the  ap- 
plication of  the  Wilmot  Proviso,  excluding  slavery  by  act  of 
Congress;  (2)  the  extension  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  line 
of  36°  30'  to  the  Pacific ;  (3)  the  full  protection,  by  the  national 
government,  of  the  "property  rights"  of  the  slaveholder  in  the 
common  territory  of  the. Union  (the  Calhoun-Davis  theory); 
and  (4)  the  reference  of  the  legality  of  slavery  to  the  territorial 
courts,  with  appeal  to  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States. 
The  first  of  these  solutions  was,  of  course,  that  of  the  abo- 
litionists and  the  Free-Soilers  of  the  North;  the  second  was 
the  original  demand  of  the  slavery  advocates,  soon,  however, 
changed  into  the  third ;  the  fourth  was  summarily  disposed  of 
by  Corwin's  sarcastic  comment.1 

But  the  organization  of  the  new  territory  was  not  the  only 
vexed  question  with  which  Congress  would  have  to  deal.  North- 
ern agitators  were  persistently  demanding  the  abolition  of 
slavery  and  the  slave  trade  in  the  national  District  of  Columbia. 
Northern  legislatures  were  passing  Personal-Liberty  Acts,  mak- 
ing the  rendition  of  fugitive  slaves  to  their  masters  extremely 
difficult.  The  " underground  railroad"  was  aiding  hundreds  of 
these  fugitives  from  the  border  states  to  escape  across  the  free 
soil  of  Indiana,  Ohio,  Pennsylvania,  and  New  York  to  the 
Canadian  border.  And,  finally,  the  legislatures,  the  press,  the 
pulpits,  the  public  platforms,  of  the  South  were  insisting  that 
the  abolitionists  must  cease  from  their  "  taunts  and  insults," 
their  self-righteous  and  meddling  propaganda  which  encouraged 
servile  insurrections,  and  must  leave  the  South  in  peace  to 
manage  its  own  domestic  institutions. 

1  See  page  440,  note. 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  447 

There  was  little  likelihood  that  the  Congress  which  met  in 
December,  1849,  would  heed  the  President's  admonition  to 
"abstain  from  those  exciting  topics  of  a  sectional  character" 
which  had  "produced  painful  apprehensions  in  the  public  mind." 
Even  before  the  House  was  organized  to  receive  President 
Taylor's  message  a  three  weeks'  struggle  between  Howell  Cobb 
of  Georgia  and  Robert  C.  Winthrop  of  Massachusetts  for  the 
Speakership  had  revealed  the  bitterness  of  the  sectional  hos- 
tility. Amid  hisses  and  applause  men  hurled  defiance  at  each 
other  across  the  aisle.  Toombs  of  Georgia  declared  that  if  the 
North  should  exclude  the  slaveholder  from  New  Mexico  and 
~Caiifornia  and  "fix  a  national  degradation  on  half  the  states  of 
the  Confederacy,"  he  for  one  was  ready  for  disunion.  Baker  of 
Illinois  sprang  to  his  feet  instantly  with  the  retort  that  a  dis- 
solution of  this  Union  would  be  impossible  "so  long  as  an  Amer- 
ican heart  beat  in  an  American  bosom."  Though  the  Whigs 
outnumbered  the  Democrats  by  112  to  105,  enough  of  the 
radical  antislavery  Whigs  deserted  the  moderate  Winthrop  to 
give  the  Speakership  to  Cobb  by  the  narrow  margin  of  102  votes 
to  100.  In  the  Senate,  where  calmer  counsels  were  supposed  to 
prevail,  resolutions  on  every  one  of  the  "exciting  topics"  were 
introduced  by  Douglas,  Benton,  Foote,  Mason,  and  Seward.  It 
looked  as  if  chaos  would  rule  the  session,  when  Henry  Clay,  the 
Nestor  of  the  Senate,  rose  on  January  29,  1850,  to  introduce  a 
set  of  compromise  resolutions  to  secure  "the  peace,  concord, 
and  harmony  of  the  Union." 

After  an  absence  of  more  than  seven  years  Clay  had  been 
sent  by  a  unanimous  vote  of  the  Kentucky  legislature  to  re- 
sume his  seat  in  the  chamber  which  he  had  first  entered  in 
Jefferson's  administration  forty-three  years  before.  He  was 
now  in  his  seventy-fourth  year,  and  that  tormenting  ambition 
for  the  presidency  which  had  shaped  his  course  and  some- 
times blurred  his  better  judgment,  since  the  exciting  contest 
of  1824,  was  stilled.  He  came  in  the  first  place  to  hold  up 
the  hands  of  the  last-elected  Whig  president,  but  still  more  to 
pour  oil  on  the  troubled  waters  of  sectional  strife.  There  were 
eight  provisions  in  Clay's  scheme  of  compromise : 


448  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

1.  California  should  be  admitted  with  her  constitution  as  a 
free  state. 

2.  Territorial  governments  should  be  established  in  the  rest 
of  the  Mexican  cession,  without  restrictions  as  to  slavery. 

3.  The  disputed  boundary  between  Texas  and  New  Mexico 
was  determined. 

4.  The  public  debt  of  Texas  acquired  before  1845  should  be 
paid  by  the  United  States  as  an  indemnity  for  the  state's  relin- 
quishment  of  her  claims  to  a  part  of  New  Mexico. 

5.  Slavery  should  not  be  abolished  in  the  District  of  Colum- 
bia without  the  consent  of  Maryland  and  of  the  people  of  the 
District,  or  without  direct  compensation  to  the  slave-owners. 

6.  The  slave  trade  should  be  prohibited  in  the  District  of 
Columbia. 

7.  A  more  effective  law  should  be  passed  for  the  rendition 
of  fugitive  slaves. 

8.  Congress  had  no  power  to  interfere  with  the  slave  trade 
between  the  states. 

On  the  fifth  and  sixth  of  February  Clay  defended  his  resolu- 
tions in  the  opening  speech  of  the  greatest  debate  that  was  ever 
heard  in  the  halls  of  Congress.  His  body  was  racked  with  the 
consumptive's  cough,  and  he  was  too  weak  to  mount  the  steps  of 
the  Capitol  without  a  supporting  arm.  But  once  on  the  floor  of 
the  Senate,  his  strength  increased  with  his  zeal  as  he  spoke  to  the 
great  throng  that  pressed  on  the  doorways  of  the  gallery  to  get 
within  sound  of  his  marvelous  voice.  His  theme  was  conciliation. 
He  was  " appalled"  as  he  beheld  in  Congress  and  the  legislatures 
of  the  states  "twenty-odd  furnaces  in  full  blast,  emitting  heat 
and  passion  and  intemperance,  and  diffusing  them  throughout 
the  whole  extent  of  this  broad  land."  What  more  could  the 
North  in  fairness  ask  than  what  she  had  already  got  ?  California 
was  free  soil.  The  table-lands  of  New  Mexico  would  also  un- 
doubtedly be  free.  The  guaranty  of  nature  was  " worth  a  thou- 
sand Wilmot  Provisos."  Could  not  the  South  also  be  content  if 
the  new  territory  were  not  closed  to  the  slaveholder,  if  her  runa- 
way negroes  were  returned,  and  her  "peculiar  institution"  were 
let  alone  in  the  slave  states  ?  Clay  held  out  the  olive  branch  to 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  449 

•'both  parts  of  this  distracted  and  unhappy  country."  No 
sacrifice  was  too  great  to  preserve  the  Union  of  the  Fathers. 
Secession  could  mean  only  war — war  "ferocious  and  bloody,  im- 
placable and  exterminating,"  out  of  which  a  Caesar  or  a  Napo- 
leon might  rise  to  put  an  end  to  self-government  and  "  crush 
the  liberties  of  both  the  severed  portions  of  this  common 
empire." 

Calhoun  spoke  on  the  fourth  of  March.  He  too  loved  the 
Union  and  dreaded  the  word  "secession."  But  long  study  of 
refined  philosophy  on  the  rights  of  the  states  had  convinced 
him  that  the  Union  as  it  existed  was  no  longer  a  guaranty  of  the 
liberties  of  the  South,  and  that  the  Constitution  had  been  trans- 
formed by  the  interpretations  of  Northern  majorities  into  an 
engine  of  repression  and  tyranny.  Calhoun  was  in  the  last  stages 
of  consumption.  He  tottered  into  the  Senate  and  sat  wrapped 
in  flannels,  his  sunken  eyes  half  closed  beneath  their  shaggy 
brows,  the  picture  of  a  prophet  of  doom,  while  his  colleague 
Mason  read  his  last  direful  warning  to  the  North.  The  time 
for  compromise  had  passed.  The  bonds  that  held  the  Union 
together  were  snapping  one  by  one.  Already  the  churches 
North  and  South  had  parted  company.  Already  Southern 
planters  were  boycotting  Northern  merchants.  The  North  by 
its  vicious  abolitionist  agitation,  by  its  attempt  to  fix  a  stigma  on 
the  character  of  the  slaveholder  and  deny  him  free  access  to 
the  common  territory  of  the  Union,  was  driving  the  South  out 
of  that  Union.  The  equilibrium  between  the  sections  was 
destroyed.  For  the  moment  free  and  slave  states  were  equally 
represented  in  the  Senate,  but  let  California  be  admitted  as  a 
free  state  and  the  last  semblance  of  equality  would  disappear. 
Only  one  remedy  was  left :  let  the  North  cease  from  her  policy 
of  aggrandizement.  She  alone  was  to  blame.  No  institution  of 
hers  was  attacked,  no  threat  was  made  to  destroy  her  political 
and  economic  order,  no  stigma  was  cast  on  her  body  of  citizens. 
The  South  had  nothing  to  compromise  or  concede.  She  asked 
only  her  rights  under  the  Constitution.  It  lay  with  the  North  to 
decide  whether  those  rights  should  be  respected  and  the  equi- 
librium between  the  sections  restored. 


450  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Calhoun  was  terribly  sincere  as  he  spoke  under  the  shadow 
of  death ;  and  the  events  of  the  next  decade  proved  the  sound- 
ness of  his  judgment,  as  against  that  of  the  supporters  of  Clay's 
measures,  that  compromise  could  not  finally  settle  the  great  con- 
troversy. In  this  he  was  closer  to  Lincoln  and  Seward,  however 
strange  the  comparison  may  seem,  than  he  was  to  Clay  and 
Webster.  But  Calhoun's  fatal  error  was  the  belief  that  the  per- 
petuation and  nationalization  of  slavery  was  the  correct  solution 
of  the  problem.  The  emancipation  of  the  negro  race  meant  for 
him  the  defiance  of  the  ordinance  of  Providence,  the  economic 
ruin  of  the  South,  and  the  end  of  white  supremacy — the  cata- 
clysm of  society.  In  the  practical  measures  which  he  suggested 
for  the  restoration  of  harmony  between  the  sections,  Calhoun 
showed  neither  psychological  nor  political  wisdom.  His  demand 
that  the  North  stop  "agitating"  the  question  of  slavery  was,  as 
Lowell  pointed  out  a  decade  later,  equivalent  to  asking  a  man 
who  has  a  fever  to  stop  shaking.  For  it  was  slavery  that  was 
agitating  the  North,  and  not  the  North  that  was  agitating 
slavery.  As  a  political  remedy  Calhoun  had  nothing  better  to 
offer  than  the  election  of  two  presidents,  one  from  the  free  and 
one  from  the  slave  states,  each  to  have  the  veto  power  over  all 
legislation  of  Congress.  Thus,  as  Professor  Dodd  remarks, 
"  permanent  deadlock  was  proposed  as  the  remedy  for  sectional 
conflict."  To  match  a  country  half  slave  and  half  free  there  was 
to  be  an  executive  half  slave  and  half  free.1 

Three  days  after  Calhoun's  grave  ultimatum  was  delivered 
Daniel  Webster  spoke.  Again  the  floor  and  galleries  of  the 
Senate  chamber  were  crowded,  for  Webster  was  the  greatest  of 
the  American  orators.  His  majestic  presence  was  matched  by 
a  powerful  intellect,  and  persuasion  sat  upon  his  lips.  Addi- 
tional attraction  was  given  to  the  occasion  by  the  rumor  that 
Webster  was  to  make  the  effort  of  his  life  and  by  the  uncertainty 
of  opinion  as  to  what  course  he  would  advocate.  Clay  was 

1This  proposed  amendment  for  a  dual  executive  is  not  in  Calhoun's  speech 
of  March  4,  but  is  fully  developed  in  a  posthumous  essay  entitled  "A  Discourse 
on  the  Constitution  and  Government  of  the  United  States." 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  451 

committed  to  the  Compromise ;  Calhoun's  opposition  could  be 
predicted  from  his  public  utterances  and  writings  for  a  score  of 
years  past ;  but  what  would  Webster  say  ?  Many  of  his  friends 
in  the  North,  citing  his  repeated  declarations  against  the  exten- 
sion of  slavery,  were  sure  that  he  would  oppose  the  Compromise. 
Others  believed  that  he  would  sacrifice  consistency  for  the  sake 
of  preserving  the  Union.  Others,  still,  with  less  generosity  of 
judgment,  thought  that  he  would  set  conciliation  above  con- 
science, with  the  hope  of  uniting  the  great  mass  of  conservatives 
North  and  South  in  the  support  of  his  candidature  for  the  presi- 
dential nomination.  No  one  can  say  just  how  the  motives  were 
mixed  in  Webster's  mind  as  he  rose  with  the  words :  "I  wish  to 
speak  today  not  as  a  Massachusetts  man  nor  as  a  Northern  man, 
but  as  an  American.  ...  I  speak  today  for  the  preservation  of 
the  Union.  *  Hear  me  for  my  cause."7  He  supported  the  Com- 
promise measures  at  every  point.  As  to  California  and  New 
Mexico,  he  held  that  slavery  was  already  excluded  from  those 
territories  by  the  laws  of  physical  geography,  which  made  impos- 
sible in  them  the  cultivation  of  the  staple  products  of  the  South. 
He  "would  not  take  pains  uselessly  to  reaffirm  an  ordinance  of 
nature  nor  to  reenact  the  will  of  God."  He  "would  put  in  no 
Wilmot  Proviso  for  the  mere  purpose  of  a  taunt  or  a  reproach." 
The  abolitionist  societies  he  condemned  as  having  "produced 
nothing  good  or  valuable  in  their  operations  for  twenty  years." 
The  one  real  grievance  of  the  South,  he  said,  was  the  aid  given  by 
public  and  private  agencies  in  the  North  to  the  fugitive  slaves ; 
and  in  redressing  this  grievance  he  was  willing,  like  Clay,  to  go 
to  any  reasonable  lengths  to  secure  the  rights  guaranteed  to  the 
South  by  the  Constitution  (Art.  IV,  sect.  2,  par.  3).  He  closed 
with  a  magnificent  peroration,  warning  his  countrymen  of  the 
impossibility  of  "peaceful  secession"  and  exhorting  them  to  be 
faithful  to  the  exalted  trust  of  preserving  the  Union,  the  Consti- 
tution, and  the  harmony  and  peace  of  all  who  were  destined  to 
live  under  it. 

The  Seventh-of-March  speech  brought  Webster  blame  and 
praise  unmeasured.    For  his  Free  Soil  friends  of  the  North,  who 


452  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

had  looked  for  a  ringing  denunciation  of  the  extension  of  slavery 
"  irrespective  of  parallels  of  latitude,"  he  had  proved  to  be  a 
broken  reed  and  a  shattered  idol.  Lucifer  had  fallen  from 
heaven.  It  was  enough  that  Webster  was  congratulated  on  his 
speech  by  Calhoun.  Lowell  spoke  of  his  "mean  and  foolish 
treachery."  Whittier  sang  the  dirge  of  his  "departed  glory" 
in  stanzas  of  gentle  denunciation : 

So  fallen !    So  lost !  the  light  withdrawn 

Which  once  he  wore ! 
The  glory  from  his  grey  hairs  gone 

Forevermore. 

Revile  him  not — the  Tempter  hath 

A  snare  for  all. 
And  pitying  tears,  not  scorn  and  wrath, 

Befit  his  fall. 


On  the  other  hand,  the  conservative  business  interests  of  the 
North  and  the  great  majority  of  the  South  approved  of  Web- 
ster's stand.  A  large  sum  of  money  was  raised  in  Boston  and 
New  York  for  printing  and  circulating  the  speech,  over  200,000 
copies  of  which  were  distributed.  It  was  claimed  that  Webster, 
by  his  repudiation  of  the  Wilmot  Proviso,  had  held  the  Southern 
Whigs  to  the  party  and  averted  the  imminent  danger  of  dis- 
union. We  need  not  have  recourse  to  the  severe  judgment  of 
Lowell  and  Whittier  to  explain  Webster's  position.  He  was 
never  an  abolitionist  and  hence  could  not  be  an  "apostate"  from 
his  creed.  He  was  a  conservative,  with  a  great  respect  for 
property,  a  great  reverence  for  the  Constitution,  and  a  great 
love  for  the  Union.  He  saw  the  Union  in  danger  and  hastened 
to  give  assurances  to  the  South.  He  saw  the  Constitution  vio- 
lated, and  advocated  an  adequate  law  to  recover  fugitive  slaves. 
As  for  "the  Tempter's  snare,"  Webster  was  too  good  a  politician 
to  need  to  have  Theodore  Parker  tell  him  that  he  would  lose  as 
many  supporters  in  the  North  as  he  would  gain  in  the  South  by 
his  attack  on  the  Proviso.  The  most  sensible  as  well  as  the  most 
charitable  interpretation  of  his  speech  is  that  which  he  gave 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  453 

himself:  "I  speak  today  for  the  preservation  of  the  Union. 
'Hear  me  for  my  cause.'"1 

The  great  triumvirate  of  Clay,  Calhoun,  and  Webster,  whose 
intelligence  and  eloquence  had  for  a  score  of  years  graced  the 
hall  where  they  now  met  together  for  the  last  time,  had  spoken. 
Others  followed,  men  of  a  later  generation,  who  were  less  con- 
cerned with  the  legal  and  constitutional  aspects  of  the  case  than 
with  the  settlement  of  a  moral  dilemma.  Ex-Governor  Seward 
of  New  York,  a  new  member  of  the  Senate,  brushed  aside  the 
threats  of  disunion  as  "too  trivial  for  serious  notice."  He  too 
had  reverence  for  the  Constitution,  but  a  Constitution  which 
devoted  our  domain  "to  union,  to  justice,  to  defense,  to  welfare, 
and  to  liberty."  He  argued  that  the  present  generation  held  the 
fortunes  of  the  country  in  trust  for  the  future ;  that  slavery  was 
an  institution  doomed  to  extinction  by  a  "higher  law"  than  the 
Constitution.  Increasing  the  stringency  of  the  fugitive-slave 
law  would  be  of  no  avail,  for  the  public  sentiment  of  the  North 
would  resist  its  enforcement.  Had  any  government  ever  suc- 
ceeded, he  asked,  in  changing  the  moral  convictions  of  its 
citizens  by  force?  He  was  opposed  to  the  Compromise.  He 
would  cooperate  with  the  South  in  any  reasonable  plan  to  re- 
move slavery,  but  he  would  not  agree  on  any  terms  to  its 
extension.  Salmon  P.  Chase,  of  Ohio,  a  convert  to  the  Free- 
Soilers  from  the  Democratic  ranks  and  also  a  new  man  in  the 
Senate,  spoke  to  the  same  purpose  as  Seward,  but  with  a  some- 
what more  defiant  attitude  toward  the  South.  The  remaining 
speeches  added  nothing  in  the  way  of  principle  or  argument. 

After  several  weeks  of  discussion  the  Senate  reported  the 
Compromise  bill  to  a  representative  committee  of  13,  composed 
of  Henry  Clay  as  chairman  and  three  members  each  from  the 
Northern  and  the  Southern  Whigs  and  Democrats.  Still  there 
seemed  to  be  no  more  immediate  prospect  of  settlement  at  the 
opening  of  July  than  at  the  end  of  January.  Seward's  influence 

!Even  his  panegyrist  Rhodes  admits  that  Webster  was  lacking  in  apprecia- 
tion of  the  moral  opposition  to  the  extension  of  slavery  into  the  new  territory 
whether  it  could  actually  exist  there  or  not  (Vol.  I,  p.  153).  Lincoln's  position 
a  decade  later  was  dictated  by  higher  principles. 


454  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

with  President  Taylor  was  strong,  and  the  administration  would 
do  nothing  to  favor  the  bill.  The  importunity  of  the  Southern 
Whigs  only  stiffened  Taylor  in  his  resistance.  Death  broke 
the  deadlock.  On  July  9  President  Taylor  succumbed  to  an 
attack  of  acute  cholera  morbus  and  was  succeeded  by  Millard 
Fillmore,  of  New  York,  who  was  a  friend  of  the  Compromise. 
One  by  one  the  measures  were  put  through  Congress  in  the 
months  of  August  and  September,  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law  finally 
passing  the  House  in  a  session  from  which  some  30  Northern 
members  absented  themselves  in  a  cowardly  fashion.  The 
Compromise  in  its  final  form  did  not  differ  essentially  from 
the  plan  proposed  by  Clay  in  January. 

On  the  whole,  it  seems  to  the  writer  that  the  balance  of 
favor  inclined  to  the  side  of  the  South.  The  $10,000,000  paid 
to  Texas  for  the  relinquishment  of  territory  to  the  east  of  the 
Rio  Grande  made  that  state  a  powerful  factor  in  the  later 
Confederacy.  The  new  Fugitive  Slave  Act  put  the  business  of 
returning  negroes  into  the  hands  of  the  federal  government  and 
encouraged  its  execution  by  favorable  legislation.  And  the 
South  won  its  contention  for  the  entrance  of  the  slaveholder 
into  the  new  territory — the  definite  rejection  of  the  Wilmot 
Proviso.  On  the  other  hand,  the  North  secured  the  abolition 
of  the  slave  trade  in  the  District  of  Columbia  and  the  admission 
of  California  as  a  free  state.  By  the  latter  provision  the  balance 
between  the  free  and  the  slave  states,  which  had  been  main- 
tained in  the  Senate  since  the  days  of  the  Missouri  Compromise, 
was  broken,  and  both  branches  of  Congress  were  controlled  by 
the  free-soil  states.  Henceforth  there  were  no  more  slave  states 
admitted  to  the  Union. 

It  is  highly  probable  that  the  Compromise  of  1850  postponed 
secession  for  a  decade.  By  the  advice  of  Calhoun  a  convention 
of  Southern  delegates  had  been  called  to  meet  at  Nashville, 
Tennessee,  in  June.  A  number  of  radicals  were  determined  to 
use  the  Nashville  meeting  for  the  publication  of  an  ultimatum 
to  the  North.  They  believed  that  the  moment  for  secession  had 
come.  But  the  strong  pleas  for  union  in  the  Senate  and  the 
reference  of  the  Compromise  measures  to  a  mixed  committee 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  455 

tempered  the  disunion  sentiment  in  the  South.  A  few  weeks 
before  the  convention  met,  the  National  Intelligencer,  the  ad- 
ministration organ  at  Washington,  canvassed  the  Southern  press 
and  found  but  50  out  of  300  newspapers  in  the  slave  states  in 
favor  of  a  radical  program  at  Nashville — and  of  those  50  many 
were  "hike-warm"  and  "backing  down."  The  great  majority 
of  the  people  of  the  South  favored  waiting  for  the  results  of  the 
debates  on  the  Compromise  before  taking  action.  When,  there- 
fore, the  Nashville  convention  met  in  June,  only  nine  states  were 
represented,  and  100  of  the  176  delegates  were  from  Tennessee. 
A  small  minority  denounced  compromise  of  any  sort  and  de- 
clared that  secession  was  inevitable;  but  the  majority,  after 
reasserting  the  doctrine  that  Congress  had  no  power  to  exclude 
slavery  from  the  territories  of  the  United  States  and  asking  for 
the  extension  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  line  to  the  Pacific 
(resolutions  hardly  consistent),  voted  to  adjourn  until  after 
the  session  of  Congress.  A  mere  "rump"  convention  of  59  radi- 
cal members  reassembled  after  the  passage  of  the  Compromise. 
It  passed  resolutions  urging  the  "assailed  states"  to  adopt  a 
policy  of  social  and  commercial  boycott  of  the  North.  The  South 
as  a  whole,  however,  accepted  the  Compromise  heartily.  Vir- 
ginia, which  had  been  ready  to  advise  secession  if  the  Wilmot 
Proviso  passed,  declared  herself  satisfied  and  counseled  her 
sister  state  of  South  Carolina  "to  desist  from  any  meditated 
secession  on  her  part."  The  Missouri  legislature  condemned 
the  Nashville  convention  as  "tending  to  foment  discord  and 
alienate  one  part  of  the  confederation  from  the  other." 
A  convention  in  Georgia  declared  that  it  would  "abide  by  the 
Compromise  as  a  permanent  adjustment  of  the  sectional  con- 
troversy." The  administration  paper  at  Washington  said  that 
it  "could  fill  a  double  sheet  of  48  columns  with  extracts  of  joy 
and  gratulations"  from  Southern  and  Western  journals  alone 
on  the  success  of  the  Compromise  measures. 

The  cause  for  this  general  "joy  and  gratulation,"  which  for 
the  moment  overbalanced  disunion  sentiment  in  even  South 
Carolina  and  Mississippi,  is  to  be  found,  no  doubt,  partly  in  the 
relief  from  the  tension  of  the  summer's  struggle  over  the  bills. 


456  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

But  the  chief  cause  was  the  assurance  given  by  Webster  and 
Clay  to  the  Union  men  of  the  South  that  the  majority  of  the 
nation  was  ready  to  allow  the  slaveholder  his  constitutional 
rights.  The  indorsement  of  Webster's  speech  by  the  "solid 
citizens"  of  the  New  England  and  Middle  Atlantic  States  was 
welcomed  by  the  South  as  a  rebuke  to  the  abolitionists;  while 
Clay,  by  his  indefatigable  labor,  his  tact  and  his  charm,  won 
over  the  Southern  Whigs  and  the  Westerners  to  the  cause  of 
union  under  the  Compromise,  leaving  the  radical  South  iso- 
lated.1 It  was  the  last  and  crowning  service  of  the  "great 
pacificator"  to  the  cause  of  the  Union.  It  is  never  permissible 
for  the  historian  to  say  what  would  have  happened  in  any  in- 
stance had  other  counsels  prevailed.  But  if  secession  had  come 
in  1850  instead  of  in  1860,  two  things  seem  almost  certain: 
first,  that  the  North,  not  yet  convinced  of  the  extent  of  the 
slaveholders'  demands,  would  have  been  more  ready  to  ac- 
quiesce in  the  peaceful  separation  of  the  sections ;  and,  second, 
that  if  war  had  come,  the  North  would  have  had  a  far  smaller 
margin  of  superiority  in  wealth,  population,  and  resources. 

The  Compromise  of  1850  was  hailed  as  the  final  settlement 
of  the  slavery  question.  By  the  Missouri  Compromise  of  1820, 
the  admission  of  Texas  as  a  slave  state  in  1845,  the  erection  of 
the  free  territory  of  Oregon  in  18480  and  the  compromise  meas- 
ures of  1850  the  status  of  slavery  had  been  determined  in  every 
square  mile  of  our  domain,  from  the  Mississippi  to  the  Pacific. 
When  Congress  met  in  December,  1850,  Clay  secured  the  signa- 
tures of  40  members  to  a  paper  declaring  that  they  would 
support  no  man  for  public  office  who  refused  to  abide  by  the 
Compromise.  If  only  North  and  South  would  carry  out  the 
pact  faithfully,  there  seemed  to  be  no  need  for  further  trouble. 

There  was,  however,  one  very  disquieting  element  in  the 
situation.  In  spite  of  pleas  of  men  like  Webster  and  Choate  in 
the  East  and  Cass  and  Douglas  in  the  West,  the  people  north 
of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  would  not  submit  to  the  enforcement 

1  Professor  Dodd,  in  his  "  Expansion  and  Conflict,"  suggestively  compares  this 
method  of  Clay's  to  that  "by  which  Jackson  defeated  Calhoun  in  1833"  on  the 
nullification  issue. 


130" 


125 


120 


115 


100 


THE   UNITED  STATES 

By  the  Compromise  of  1850 


Original  Free  States  I          I  Original  Slave  States 

"^|  Free  States  |  |  Slave  St 

Territories  closed  to  Slavery  ~J  Territories  open  to  Slavery 


___  Oregon  Trail 
Santa  Fe  Trail 
Route  of  the  Forty-Niners 
Cumberland  Road 
Railroads 


Fremont's  Expedition 

Pony  Express 

Frontier  Line  of  Settlement 


Stage  Lines 

SCALE  OF  M1LES 


Longitude      100°  West_ 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  457 

of  the  new  Fugitive  Slave  Act.  Of  course,  the  abolitionists,  who 
set  their  moral  convictions  above  the  law,  were  opposed  to  the 
return  of  any  escaped  slave,  but  the  provisions  of  the  new  law 
made  it  odious  in  the  eyes  of  thousands  of  moderates  also.  It 
was  so  heavily  weighted  against  the  fugitive  that  not  even  the 
free  negro  of  the  North  could  feel  secure.  No  jury  trial  was 
allowed  to  the  negro  claimed  as  a  fugitive.  Master  or  agent 
had  simply  to  present  an  affidavit  before  a  United  States  judge 
or  a  commissioner,  whose  fee  was  doubled  if  he  decided  in  favor 
of  the  claimant.  The  whole  community  was  bound  by  the  law 
to  come  to  the  aid  of  the  commissioner  as  a  posse  comitatus  to 
prevent  the  rescue  or  escape  of  the  condemned  fugitive,  and 
the  United  States  marshal  was  liable  to  a  fine  of  $1000  and  a 
civil  suit  for  the  value  of  the  slave  in  case  the  latter  got  away 
or  was  rescued.  Finally,  the  law  was  ex  post  facto  (and  therefore 
unconstitutional)  in  that  it  applied  to  slaves  who  had  fled  from 
their  masters  at  any  time — even  years  before.  In  the  face  of 
such  a  law  it  was  inevitable  that  the  "underground  railroad" 
should  redouble  its  activity,  that  citizens  should  refuse  to  come 
to  the  aid  of  the  slave-catcher,  and  that  negroes  should  be 
rescued  from  jails  and  courthouses  and  smuggled  over  the 
border  into  Canada.  Mass  meetings  in  the  North  condemned 
the  act  in  language  as  strong  and  "seditious"  as  that  used  by 
the  South  against  the  Wilmot  Proviso.  They  declared  the  act 
"null  and  void"  and  registered  their  intention  to  "make  it 
powerless  in  the  country"  by  an  "absolute  refusal  to  obey  its 
inhuman  and  diabolical  provisions." 

Southern  extremists  too,  in  spite  of  their  discomfiture  at 
the  Nashville  convention  and  the  manifest  strength  of  the 
unionist  sentiment  in  the  elections  of  1851,  kept  up  the  agita- 
tion for  disunion.  Governor  Quitman  of  Mississippi,  Yancey 
of  Alabama,  Rhett  of  South  Carolina,  and  Bell  of  Texas  were 
prominent  in  this  movement.  "Southern  Rights"  associations 
were  formed,  one  in  Alabama  calling  for  a  new  Southern  party 
and  announcing  that  the  state  would  follow  any  other  Southern 
state  into  secession.  But  the  extremists,  both  Northern  nulli- 
fiers  and  Southern  secessionists,  were  repressed  by  the  moder- 


458  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ates  as  a  dwindling  group  of  irreconcilables.  "The  law  will  be 
upheld,"  declared  Cass,  "wherever  the  flag  of  the  Union  waves." 
In  a  word,  the  great  majority  of  both  sections  were  determined 
that  the  Compromise  should  be  a  finality. 

The  only  hope  for  this  was  the  preservation  of  the  two  great 
political  parties  as  national  organizations  and  the  avoidance  of 
their  polarization  into  a  Southern  Rights  party  and  a  Free  Soil 
party.  Hence,  in  the  campaign  of  1852  both  parties  stood  on  the 
platform  of  the  finality  of  the  Compromise.  There  was  no  other 
important  national  issue,  and  it  became  simply  a  question  as  to 
which  party  could  show  the  more  cohesive  organization  and 
inspire  the  greater  confidence  in  its  fidelity  to  the  common  plat- 
form. Since  the  great  Whig  leaders  Clay  and  Webster  had  been 
the  champions  of  the  Compromise,  and  the  Whig  president 
Fillmore  had  facilitated  its  passage,  it  would  seem  as  if  the 
Whigs  should  have  been  intrusted  with  its  execution.  But  the 
Whig  party  was  no  longer  the  party  of  Henry  Clay,  who  was  on 
his  deathbed  when  its  convention  met  in  June,  1852,  and  it 
had  never  been  the  party  of  Daniel  Webster.  Since  the  Mexican 
War  the  antislavery  sentiment  in  its  ranks  had  been  steadily 
growing,  as  the  influence  of  Seward  testifies.  Had  the  con- 
vention nominated  either  Fillmore  or  Webster,  the  Southern 
wing  of  the  party  would  have  been  content ;  but  the  Fillmore 
and  Webster  forces  refused  to  combine,  and  General  Winfield 
Scott  was  nominated  on  the  fifty-third  ballot.  The  Whigs  had 
won  two  elections  with  a  military  candidate,  and  now  they 
hoped  to  repeat  the  triumphs  of  '40  and  '48  with  the  "hero  of 
Lundy 's  Lane  and  Chapul tepee."  But  Scott  was  Seward's  candi- 
date and  was  suspected  of  a  tincture  of  Free  Soil  principles. 
Leading  Southern  Whigs,  like  Toombs  and  Stephens,  bolted 
the  ticket.  The  result  was  the  overwhelming  election  of  Frank- 
lin Pierce  of  New  Hampshire,  whom  the  Democrats  had  nomi- 
nated after  a  long  struggle  in  their  convention  between  Douglas, 
Cass,  Marcy,  and  Buchanan.  Pierce  carried  every  state  in  the 
Union  except  Vermont,  Massachusetts,  Kentucky,  and  Ten- 
nessee, receiving  254  electoral  votes  to  42  for  Scott.  He  was 
an  amiable,  colorless,  and  thoroughly  "safe"  man,  pledged  to 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  459 

respect  the  Compromise  of  1850.  His  election  appeared  to  be 
the  triumph  of  conciliation,1  for  the  Free  Soil  vote  of  the  North, 
which  had  been  the  determining  factor  in  the  two  previous 
elections,  shrank  from  291,263  to  155,825.  A  less-noticed  but 
more  ominous  fact  was  the  decline  of  the  Whig  vote  in  the 
seven  cotton  states  of  the  South2  from  138,369  to  81,775.  The 
disintegration  of  the  great  Whig  party  had  begun. 

For  the  sake  of  following  the  crisis  of  1850  to  its  logical 
conclusion,  we  have  passed  over  important  and  interesting  dip- 
lomatic events  of  the  mid-century,  which  must  claim  our  atten- 
tion at  the  close  of  this  chapter.  The  year  of  Taylor's  election 
was  a  year  of  general  revolution  in  Europe.  The  French  over- 
threw the  Orleans  dynasty  and  established  the  Second  Republic. 
Liberal  forces  in  the  Italian  states  either  drove  out  their  Aus- 
trian despots  or  curbed  them  by  written  constitutions.  The 
Prussian  king,  after  revolution  in  the  streets  of  Berlin,  called  an 
assembly  to  frame  a  constitution.  Prince  Metternich,  who  for 
a  generation  had  been  the  leader  of  reaction  in  Europe,  was 
forced  to  flee  from  Vienna,  and  the  Hungarians  rose  in  revolt 
against  the  domination  of  Austria,  which  they  had  endured  for 
three  centuries.  The  United  States  were  in  hearty  sympathy 
with  these  democratic  revolutions  in  Europe.  Taylor  sent  an 
envoy  to  Austria  in  1849  with  instructions  to  recognize  the 
Hungarian  Republic  as  soon  as  it  should  be  established.  The 
mission  proved  futile,  for  Russian  troops  came  to  the  aid  of 
Austria  in  the  ruthless  suppression  of  the  Hungarian  revolt. 

When  the  Austrian  charge  d'affaires  at  Washington,  the  Che- 
valier Huelsemann,  protested  against  the  unfriendly  behavior 
of  our  government,  he  was  answered  by  Fillmore's  Secretary  of 
State,  Daniel  Webster  (December  13,  1850),  in  a  letter  which 
did  justice  to  the  mid-century  spirit  of  "spread-eagleism." 

al  say  "appeared,"  because  a  vote  in  the  House  (April  5,  1852)  on  the  reso- 
lution that  the  Compromise  should  be  accepted  as  a  final  settlement  of  the 
slavery  question  was  carried  by  only  103  votes  to  74. 

2 Namely:  Alabama,  Arkansas,  Florida,  Georgia,  Louisiana,  Mississippi,  and 
Texas.  The  electors  of  South  Carolina  were  chosen  by  the  legislature  of  the 
state  until  after  the  Civil  War. 


460  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Webster  dwelt  on  the  achievements  of  the  American  republic, 
its  economic  prosperity  and  political  liberty,  its  commanding 
place  among  the  nations,  its  power  "spread  out  over  a  region 
...  in  comparison  with  which  the  possessions  of  the  House 
of  Hapsburg  [were]  but  a  patch  on  the  earth's  surface."  The 
American  people  could  not  "fail  to  cherish  always  a  lively 
interest  in  the  fortunes  of  nations  struggling  for  institutions 
like  their  own."  Webster  acknowledged  that  his  "boastful  and 
rough"  letter  was  written  more  for  home  consumption  than  for 
Austria's  correction.  It  was  a  contribution  to  the  "finality" 
of  the  newly  passed  Compromise  of  1850.  The  author  of  the 
Seventh-of-March  speech  wrote  the  letter  of  the  thirteenth 
of  December  to  "touch  the  nation's  pride  and  make  a  man 
look  sheepish  and  silly  who  should  speak  of  disunion."  Even 
Mr.  Rhodes,  Webster's  stoutest  champion,  admits  that  the 
letter  was  "hardly  more  than  a  stump  speech  under  diplo- 
matic disguise"  (Vol.  I,  p.  206). 

Louis  Kossuth,  the  leader  of  the  Hungarian  revolution, 
eluded  the  vengeance  of  Austria  and  took  refuge  in  Turkey, 
whence  he  was  brought  to  the  United  States.  From  the  day 
of  his  arrival  in  New  York,  in  December,  1851,  to  the  day  of 
his  departure  the  next  summer,  he  received  a  constant  though 
waning  ovation  as  he  traveled  through  the  states  east  of  the 
Mississippi  River.  His  impassioned  pleas  for  downtrodden 
Hungary  gave  large  audiences  ample  opportunity  to  relieve  by 
tumultuous  applause  feelings  which  had  been  raised  to  the 
highest  pitch  of  excitement  over  the  slavery  controversy.  But 
when  Kossuth 'came  to  reckon  up  the  actual  cash  contributed 
to  the  cause  of  Hungarian  freedom,  he  was  sorely  disappointed. 
He  had  collected  less  than  $100,000.  More  had  been  spent  on 
banquets  and  parades  in  his  honor.  Kossuth  was  formally  re- 
ceived by  both  Houses  of  Congress  and  dined  at  the  President's 
table,  but  the  government  was  careful  not  to  commit  itself 
to  any  intervention  in  European  affairs. 

The  other  side  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine — namely,  the  pro- 
tection of  the  American  continent  against  the  encroachments 
of  European  powers — was  also  a  lively  interest  in  the  middle 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  461 

years  of  the  century.  We  have  already  seen  (p.  415)  what  a 
large  part  the  threat  of  such  encroachment  played  in  the  Texan 
negotiations.  Immediately  after  the  Mexican  War  a  critical 
situation  arose  in  Central  America.  The  British  had  estab- 
lished a  protectorate  over  the  Mosquito  Indians  of  Nicaragua 
in  the  seventeenth  century.  In  spite  of  the  protests  of  Spain, 
and  of  the  Central  American  republics  after  they  had  thrown 
off  the  yoke  of  Spain,  Great  Britain  held  on  persistently  and 
extended  her  authority  until  it  covered  most  of  the  coast  below 
the  Mexican  peninsula  of  Yucatan  and  the  Isthmus  of  Panama. 
Our  acquisition  of  California  and  Oregon  had  suddenly  brought 
us  to  the  Pacific,  making  the  control  of  Central  America,  where 
for  centuries  canal  routes  had  been  projected,  a  point  of  vital 
interest.  When  British  warships  entered  the  San  Juan  River 
in  Nicaragua  and  took  possession  of  the  fort  of  Greytown,  in 
January,  1848,  there  was  heated  discussion  in  Congress  on  the 
question  of  our  intervention.  President  Polk  announced  his 
firm  determination  to  uphold  the  Monroe  Doctrine  (April, 
1848).  A  few  weeks  later  the  President  sent  Elijah  Hise  as 
special  envoy  to  Guatemala  to  "  cultivate  more  friendly  rela- 
tions with  the  Central  American  states,"  and  the  Senate  ratified 
a  treaty  with  New  Granada  (now  Colombia)  which  had  been 
pending  for  two  years,  giving  the  United  States  right  of  way 
across  the  isthmus  for  road,  railroad,  or  canal  construction. 
Early  in  1849  Hise  negotiated  treaties  with  Nicaragua  and 
Honduras  for  the  right  of  transit  across  those  republics.  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States,  each  apprehending  the  other's 
desire  to  control  Central  America,  engaged  in  tart  diplomatic 
controversy,  and  each  sought  to  seize  a  point  of  vantage  in  the 
region.  They  came  to  an  agreement  when  Sir  Henry  Lytton 
Bulwer,  who  arrived  in  Washington  at  the  close  of  the  year  1849 
as  envoy  extraordinary,  suggested  that  the  countries  stop  bick- 
ering over  spheres  of  influence  in  Central  America  and  agree  on 
a  common  policy  for  a  canal. 

Taylor's  Secretary  of  State,  John  M.  Clayton,  forthwith 
entered  into  negotiations  with  Sir  Henry.  On  April  19,  1850, 
a  treaty  was  signed,  and  on  July  4  the  ratifications  of  the  two 


462  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

governments  were  exchanged.  The  famous  Clayton-Bulwer 
Treaty  "for  facilitating  and  protecting  the  construction  of  a 
ship  canal  between  the  Atlantic  and  Pacific  oceans"  pledged 
the  two  governments  never  to  obtain  exclusive  control  over  such 
a  canal,  nor  to  erect  fortifications  commanding  it,  nor  to  colonize 
or  acquire  dominion  over  any  part  of  Central  America.  They 
were  to  protect  any  company  that  should  build  a  canal  and 
to  guarantee  the  neutrality  of  the  canal  when  built.  It  was  to 
be  maintained  "for  the  benefit  of  mankind  on  equal  terms  to 
all."  In  spite  of  the  liberal  terms  of  the  treaty,  trouble  be- 
tween the  United  States  and  Great  Britain  in  Central  America 
was  not  ended.  Great  Britain  still  held  on  to  the  Mosquito 
protectorate  and  Belize,  and  even  annexed  some  islands  off  the 
coast  of  Honduras  (1852).  A  British  man-of-war  fired  on  a 
steamer  of  the  American  Transport  Company  which  refused 
to  pay  duties  to  the  Mosquito  government;  and  a  year  later 
an  American  vessel  bombarded  and  destroyed  the  port  of  Grey- 
town,  where  a  mob  had  attacked  the  American  consul.  Had  it 
not  been  for  the  rise  of  more  important  questions  for  both 
governments  in  1854 — the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill  and  the 
Crimean  War — the  Central  American  issue  might  not  have 
sunk  so  suddenly  into  insignificance. 

A  third  topic  of  diplomatic  interest  in  the  mid-century  was 
the  attempt  of  certain  people  in  the  South  to  get  possession,  by 
fair  means  or  foul,  of  the  island  of  Cuba.  Ever  since  the  days 
of  Thomas  Jefferson  there  had  been  prophecies  by  the  expan- 
sionists that  "the  pearl  of  the  Antilles"  must  eventually  be 
ours.  At  any  rate,  as  our  interest  in  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  grew 
through  the  acquisition  of  Louisiana,  the  cession  of  Florida, 
and  the  annexation  of  Texas,  it  became  more  and  more  obvious 
that  the  great  island  guarding  the  entrance  to  the  Gulf  must 
not  be  allowed  to  pass  into  the'  hands  of  a  strong  European 
power.  When  lands  for  the  profitable  employment  of  slave 
labor  were  growing  scarcer  and  the  balance  of  power  of  the  free 
and  the  slave  states  in  the  Senate  was  broken,  additional  motives 
for  the  acquisition  of  Cuba  were  furnished.  The  island  would 
make  five  fertile  slave  states,  which  would  add  ten  members  to 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  463 

the  United  States  Senate.  The  ardent  annexationist  Polk  had 
ordered  the  American  representative  at  Madrid  to  sound  the 
Spanish  government  on  the  sale  of  Cuba  for  $100,000,000,  only 
to  be  met  with  the  reply  that  "rather  than  see  the  island  trans- 
ferred to  any  power  [Spain]  would  prefer  seeing  it  sunk  in  the 
ocean."  The  way  of  legitimate  acquisition  being  closed,  filibus- 
tering took  its  place.  A  Venezuelan  adventurer  named  Lopez, 
who  had  lived  in  Havana,  conceived  the  idea  of  " liberating" 
Cuba  from  Spanish  rule.  So  popular  was  the  project  with  the 
young  men  of  the  South  that  the  government  at  Washington 
seemed  powerless  to  enforce  the  neutrality  laws.  Meetings  of 
sympathy  with  the  filibusterers  were  held  in  Nashville,  Balti- 
more, Cincinnati,  and  even  in  Philadelphia,  Pittsburgh,  and  New 
York.  Lopez  had  the  encouragement  of  important  men  like 
Calhoun,  Governor  Quitman,  and  Jefferson  Davis.  He  repre- 
sented that  "all  Cuba  was  ripe  for  revolution"  and  that  "the 
officers  of  the  Cuban  army  had  given  written  pledges  to  join  the 
invaders."  A  first  descent  on  Cuba  in  the  spring  of  1850  failed ; 
but  Lopez  found  his  way  back  to  New  Orleans,  where,  after 
being  acquitted  of  the  charge  of  having  violated  the  neutrality 
laws,  he  gathered  a  new  expedition  of  nearly  500  men,  com- 
prising members  of  some  of  the  best  families  of  the  South. 
Colonel  Crittenden,  the  nephew  of  the  Attorney-General  of  the 
United  States,  was  second  in  command.  Again  the  expedition 
proved  disastrous  (August,  1851).  The  invaders  found  no  wel- 
coming band  of  revolutionists  in  Cuba.  Both  Lopez,  who  had 
marched  into  the  interior  of  the  island,  and  Crittenden,  who 
had  remained  on  the  coast,  were  captured  and  executed.  Only 
a  few  men  escaped.  Those  who  were  not  killed  in  the  skir- 
mishes or  who  had  not  died  of  fatigue,  fever,  and  starvation 
were  taken  prisoners,  and  of  these  over  150,  most  of  them 
American  citizens,  were  sent  to  Spain,  ostensibly  to  be  put  to 
work  in  the  mines. 

When  the  news  of  the  failure  of  the  second  Lopez  expedition, 
with  the  cruel  punishment  of  the  victims,  reached  New  Orleans, 
the  people  broke  out  into  a  riot.  They  wrecked  the  office  of 
a  Spanish  newspaper,  destroyed  Spanish  shops,  mobbed  the 


464  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Spanish  consulate,  defaced  the  portrait  of  the  queen,  and  tore 
down  the  Spanish  flag  and  burned  it  in  a  bonfire  in  the  pub- 
lic square.  Secretary  of  State  Webster  could  do  no  less  than 
apologize  to  Spain  for  the  insult  to  her  flag  and  frankly  acknowl- 
edge the  outrage  which  "was  committed  in  the  heat  of  blood." 
He  assured  the  Spanish  government  that  when  a  new  consul 
should  be  sent  to  New  Orleans,  the  flag  of  his  ship  would  be 
saluted  "as  a  demonstration  of  respect"  and  an  apology  "for 
the  grave  injustice  done  to  his  predecessor." 

The  Lopez  incident  was  thus  closed,  but  there  was  no  modi- 
fication in  the  South  either  of  the  resentment  against  Spain  or 
of  the  desire  for  Cuba.  President  Pierce,  who  asserted  in  his 
inaugural  address  that  he  would  not  be  "controlled  by  any 
timid  forebodings  of  evil  from  expansion,"  seemed  deliberately 
to  invite  an  issue  with  Spain  over  Cuba  by  his  appointment 
of  Pierre  Soule  of  Louisiana  as  minister  to  the  court  of  Madrid. 
Soule  had  advocated  the  annexation  of  Cuba  in  the  United 
States  Senate  and  had  spoken  of  the  "heroic"  Lopez  and  Crit- 
tenden  as  deserving  "the  praise  that  is  freely  accorded  to 
Lafayette  and  Kosciusko."  Even  on  his  way  to  Spain,  where 
it  was  intimated  in  the  press  that  he  would  not  be  persona 
grata,  he  addressed  a  deputation  of  Cuban  exiles  and  spoke  of 
"the  tyrants  of  the  Old  World."  Soon  after  his  arrival  in 
Madrid  an  American  merchant  steamer,  the  Black  Warrior, 
was  seized  by  the  authorities  of  the  port  of  Havana  (on  the 
ground  that  her  captain  had  violated  an  obsolete  harbor  regu- 
lation) and  her  cargo  of  cotton  confiscated.  Instructed  to  pre- 
sent our  grievances  to  the  court  of  Madrid,  Soule,  in  his  excess 
of  zeal,  delivered  an  ultimatum.  Unless  reparation  should  be 
made  within  forty-eight  hours,  he  said,  he  would  ask  for  his  pass- 
ports. Secretary  Marcy  did  not  support  Soule  in  his  extrava- 
gant demand,  but  ordered  him  to  confer  with  Buchanan  and 
Mason,  our  ministers  to  Great  Britain  and  France  respectively, 
on  the  best  policy  for  our  government  to  pursue  in  regard  to 
Spain  and  Cuba. 

The  ministers  met  at  Ostend,  in  the  Netherlands,  in  the 
summer  of  1854.  Buchanan  and  Mason  were  both  annexation- 


THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC  465 

ists,  though  more  moderate  than  Soule.  They  had  both  been 
members  of  Folk's  cabinet,  Buchanan  as  Secretary  of  State  hav- 
ing made  Spain  the  $100,000,000  offer  for  Cuba.  Now,  under 
the  spur  of  the  impetuous  Soule,  they  drew  up  the  famous  Os- 
tend  Manifesto.  This  remarkable  document,  after  rehearsing 
the  reasons  why  Cuba  should  belong  to  the  United  States,  con- 
cluded with  the  statement  that  "if  Spain,  dead  to  the  voice  of 
her  own  interests  and  moved  by  pride  and  a  false  sense  of 
honor,  refused  to  sell  Cuba/'  then,  if  her  possession  of  the 
island  "endangered  the  peace  and  existence  of  our  Union,"  we 
should  be  justified  "by  every  law  human  and  divine"  in  taking 
it  from  her.  Now  was  the  moment,  said  Soule,  when  France 
and  Great  Britain  were  involved  in  the  Crimean  War,  for  the 
United  States  to  force  Spain  to  yield  up  the  pearl  of  the  Antilles. 
It  would  be  a  great  stroke  of  fortune  for  the  slave  interests 
of  the  South. 

But  a  new  situation  had  arisen  in  the  United  States.  The 
battle  between  freedom  and  slavery  in  the  Western  territory  had 
been  reopened  after  four  years  of  troubled  truce.  The  cautious 
Marcy  repudiated  the  Ostend  Manifesto  and  forced  Soule's 
resignation  by  a  dispatch  of  withering  sarcasm.  The  Cuban 
incident  was  closed,1  and  the  dreams  of  the  Southern  expan- 
sionists, roseate  for  a  moment,  were  rudely  broken  by  the  voice 
of  Stephen  A.  Douglas. 

!In  the  summer  of  1855  we  quietly  accepted  Spain's  tardy  apology  for  the 
seizure  of  the  Black  Warrior. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF 

Unsettled  questions  have  no  pity  for  the  repose  of  a  nation. 

JAMES  A.  GARFIELD 

THE  BUSINESS  MAN'S  PEACE 

Confidence  surrounded  the  handsome  head  of  Franklin  Pierce 
like  an  aureole  as  he  stood  before  the  throng  at  the  eastern 
portico  of  the  Capitol,  on  March  5,  1853,  to  deliver  his  in- 
augural address.  His  mandate  to  guide  the  American  nation 
was  the  clearest  since  Jackson's  triumphant  election  exactly  a 
quarter  of  a  century  before.  Conciliation  was  the  platform  on 
which  he  had  run;  harmony  was  the  burden  of  his  message. 
He  spoke  of  the  faith  of  the  fathers  in  the  destiny  of  our  nation 
and  congratulated  the  country  on  a  steady  expansion  which 
had  nearly  trebled  the  stars  in  our  banner.  He  gave  comfort 
to  the  men  who  were  casting  longing  eyes  on  Cuba  and  Nic- 
aragua by  the  assertion  that  his  administration  would  "not  be 
controlled  by  any  timid  forebodings  of  evil  from  expansion." 
But  at  the  same  time  he  protested  that  "no  blot  should  be 
suffered  to  mar  our  fair  record,"  no  act  tolerated  that  could 
not  "challenge  a  ready  justification  before  the  tribunal  of  the 
world."  The  Compromise  measures  of  1850,  he  declared,  were 
"strictly  constitutional  and  to  be  unhesitatingly  carried  into 
effect."  The  "perilous  crisis"  was  safely  passed,  the  slavery 
question  was  "at  rest."  He  fervently  hoped  that  no  sectional 
ambition  or  fanatical  excitement  might  again  "threaten  the 
durability  of  our  institutions  or  obscure  the  light  of  our 
prosperity." 

Yet,  in  spite  of  the  new  president's  assurances,  there  was 
something  ominous  in  both  his  words  and  his  deeds.  He  leaned 

466 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  467 

visibly  toward  the  South.  He  emphasized  the  constitutionality 
of  "involuntary  servitude"  and  called  for  a  "cheerful"  exe- 
cution of  the  Fugitive-Slave  Law.  He  had  no  word  of  rebuke 
for  the  "fire-eaters"  of  the  Nashville  convention,  but  threat- 
ened a  "stern  resistance"  to  the  "morbid  enthusiasm"  of  the 
abolitionists.  His  cabinet  was  almost  wholly  proslavery  in 
its  sympathies.  The  most  influential  member,  Jefferson  Davis, 
Secretary  of  War,  was  notoriously  dissatisfied  with  the  great 
compromise  on  which  the  administration  claimed  to  rest.  Not 
a  man  of  antislavery  views  was  sent  abroad  to  represent  the 
United  States.  Soule  and  Mason,  who  went  to  Madrid  and 
Paris  respectively,  were  intense  proslavery  men,  keen  for  the 
acquisition  of  Cuba.  Buchanan,  who  was  sent  to  the  court  of 
St.  James,  had  pointed  out  to  Pierce  in  1852  that  the  president 
who  secured  the  cession  of  Cuba  would  "render  his  name  illus- 
trious and  place  it  on  the  same  level  with  that  of  his  great 
predecessor  who  gave  Louisiana  to  the  Union."  Part  of  the 
results  of  the  President's  devotion  to  these  Southern  interests 
we  have  already  seen  in  our  last  chapter;  others  will  appear 
as  our  story  proceeds  in  the  next  section.  Here  we  must  pause 
to  consider  the  economic  state  of  our  country  in  the  middle  of 
the  century. 

When  Pierce  spoke  of  "the  light  of  our  prosperity,"  he 
struck  the  true  note  of  the  Compromise  of  1850.  It  was  a 
business  man's  peace.  The  country  was  tired  of  the  protracted 
strife  over  slavery,  which  Ben  ton  had  complained  of,  thirty 
years  before,  as  infesting  our  public  life  like  the  plague  of  frogs 
in  Egypt.  The  generation  which  had  been  vexed  with  the 
agitation  over  gag  resolutions,  the  annexation  of  Texas,  and 
the  Wilmot  Proviso  witnessed  at  the  same  time  a  remarkable 
growth  in  the  population  and  wealth  of  the  United  States.  The 
census  of  1850  was  the  first  of  those  elaborate  compilations 
which  furnish  the  data  not  alone  of  our  territory  and  population 
but  of  the  moral,  social,  and  industrial  condition  of  our  people 
as  well — their  religion  and  education,  their  newspapers  and' 
libraries,  their  charities  and  crimes,  their  occupations,  wages, 
and  profits,  the  yield  of  their  fields  and  factories,  the  revenues 


468  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

from  their  realty  and  commerce.  The  census  of  1850  was  at  once 
an  indorsement  and  a  challenge.  It  justified  the  experiment  of 
threescore  years  of  political  democracy,  and  it  stimulated  faith 
in  the  greater  destinies  awaiting  the  American  republic.  Long- 
fellow's "Building  of  the  Ship"  was  its  dedication  ode. 

Our  population  had  grown  from  a  seaboard  people  of  3,929,- 
214,  when  the  first  census  was  taken  in  1790,  to  a  continental 
people  of  23,191,876.  In  1790  we  were  equal  in  population 
to  only  the  tiniest  powers  in  Europe,  but  by  1850  we  had  out- 
distanced them  all  except  Russia,  Great  Britain,  Austria,  and 
France.  The  states  of  the  Atlantic  slope  still  held  the  major- 
ity of  our  people,  but  only  by  a  narrow  margin.  More  than 
10,000,000  of  our  23,000,000  were  living  in  the  great  central 
basin  of  the  Mississippi,  with  a  scant  120,000  in  California  and 
Oregon.  The  greatest  acceleration  of  growth  was  in  the  old 
Northwest  Territory  of  1787  and  beyond  the  Mississippi  in 
the  new  state  of  Iowa  and  territory  of  Minnesota.  While  the 
East  increased  but  10  per  cent  in  population  in  the  period  of 
1830-1850,  and  the  South  (including  the  new  cotton  lands  of 
the  lower  Mississippi  Valley)  increased  40  per  cent,  the  North- 
west grew  over  75  per  cent  in  this  score  of  years.  This  increase 
was  due  almost  wholly  to  the  rapid  reproduction  of  .our  na- 
tive stock,  which  was  90  per  cent  of  British  extraction  at  the 
time  of  Washington's  inauguration.  Early  marriages  and  large 
families  were  the  rule,  especially  on  the  frontier,  where  home- 
steads were  easy  to  get  and  sons  and  daughters  grew  up  to  a 
life  of  wholesome  toil  crowned  by  the  clearing  of  their  own 
new  farms  still  farther  west. 

No  record  was  kept  of  the  arrival  of  immigrants  in  America 
until  Congress,  by  a  law  of  i8i9;  required  the  collectors  of 
customs  in  our  ports  to  file  with  the  Secretary  of  State  the  age, 
sex,  occupation,  and  country  of  all  foreign  passengers  landing 
in  their  districts.  From  the  lists  kept  in  the  imperfect  execu- 
tion of  this  law  it  appears  that  during  the  decade  1820-1830 
about  140,000  immigrants  were  added  to  the  200,000  who  were 
estimated  to  have  come  since  the  foundation  of  our  Republic. 
This  insignificant  immigration  shot  up,  however,  to  600,000  in 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  469 

the  decade  1830-1840  and  to  1,700,000  in  the  following  ten- 
year  period.  By  the  middle  of  the  century  some  2,800,000 
(or  12  per  cent)  of  our  population  were  foreign-born.  The 
causes  of  this  recent  influx  of  immigrants  lay  partly  in  un- 
toward events  in  Europe  and  partly  in  attractive  conditions  in 
America.  Political  revolutions  in  1830  on  the  continent  of 
Europe  broke  the  unstable  peace  which  had  followed  the 
Napoleonic  upheaval,  and  the  introduction  of  the  Industrial 
Revolution  caused  widespread  disturbances  in  the  field  of  labor. 
A  total  failure  of  the  potato  crop  in  Ireland  in  1845,  followed 
by  a  blight  which  destroyed  the  plants  entirely  the  next  year, 
brought  the  Emerald  Isle  to  a  pitiable  state  of  famine  and  sent 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  her  starving  people  to  our  shores. 
And,  finally,  the  great  revolutionary  year  of  1848  convulsed 
Europe  from  the  Pyrenees  to  the  Balkans.  America  was  the 
Mecca  for  the  destitute  peasant  and  the  exiled  patriot.  The 
leveling  of  the  privileges  of  wealth,  creed,  and  family  by  the 
spread  of  the  Jacksonian  democracy  assured  the  immigrant 
welcome  into  a  political  fellowship  in  the  New  World.  The 
expanding  mills  and  factories  of  the  East  absorbed  the  labor  of 
thousands;  other  thousands  joined  contractors'  gangs  to  work 
on  the  newly  projected  canals  and  railroads ;  while  the  bound- 
less lands  of  the  West  called  the  adventurous  pioneer  and  the 
thrifty  peasant,  for  whom  life  was  not  worth  living  unless  he 
could  see  the  sun  rise  and  set  on  his  orchards  and  grasslands. 

About  300,000  immigrants  came  to  America  in  the  sin- 
gle year  1848 — chiefly  Germans  and  Irish.  The  former  were 
land-lovers  and  set  out  for  the  Middle  West,  sometimes,  unfortu- 
nately, lured  to  barren  regions  "on  the  faith  of  a  lying  pro- 
spectus," but  generally  following  the  line  of  instructions  which 
were  already  appearing  in  the  excellent  guidebooks  published 
in  their  home  country.  By  the  census  of  1850  there  were  over 
80,000  Germans  in  the  states  of  the  Northwest.  The  popu- 
lation of  Cincinnati,  Milwaukee,  St.  Louis,  and  Chicago  still 
testifies  to  the  great  migration  from  the  Fatherland  in  the  mid- 
century.  The  Irish,  on  the  other  hand,  remained  for  the  most 
part  in  the  cities  on  the  Atlantic  coast,  where  they  soon  dis- 


470  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

played  that  aptitude  for  "practical"  politics  which  has  made 
the  name  of  Tammany  Hall  at  once  a  marvel  and  a  byword. 
New  York  City  alone  had  133,000  Irish  immigrants  in  1850. 
Boston,  Baltimore,  Philadelphia,  and  the  other  coast  cities  fol- 
lowed according  to  their  capacity,  while  many  a  New  England 
town  had  its  "  Irish  village." 

The  influx  of  large  numbers  of  foreigners  gave  rise  to  serious 
political  and  social  problems.  Corruption  and  machine  politics, 
lavish  bribery  in  elections,  a  debased  press  pandering  to  prej- 
udice and  passion,  to  religious  bigotry  and  race  hatred,  ap- 
peared in  many  quarters  to  an  alarming  degree.  A  bitter 
persecution  was  directed  against  the  Irish,  who,  before  the 
large  influx  of  Italians  and  Poles,,  formed  the  bulk  of  our 
Roman  Catholic  immigrants.  A  "Native  American"  movement 
developed  to  combat  the  influence  of  the  Catholic  Church 
in  our  politics  and  to  resist  the  efforts  of  that  church  to  se- 
cure a  share  of  the  public  funds  for  the  support  of  its  paro- 
chial schools.  As  early  as  1834  a  convent  occupied  by  the 
Ursuline  Sisters  near  Boston  had  been  sacked  and  burned. 
Anti-Catholic  rioters  in  New  York  attacked  churches  and 
dwellings  in  1842,  smashing  the  windows  of  the  episcopal  resi- 
dence of  Archbishop  Hughes.  Two  years  later  the  "Nativists" 
organized  in  the  wards  of  Philadelphia  for  a  systematic  war 
against  the  Roman  Catholics,  declaring  that  "Popery"  was 
"incompatible  with  free  institutions."  Excited  men  rushed  out 
from  heated  mass  meetings  to  attack  the  Irish  in  the  streets. 
Catholic  churches,  schools,  and  shops  were  set  on  fire.  The 
militia  was  called  out  three  times  before  the  riot  was  finally 
quelled,  after  the  destruction  of  thousands  of  dollars'  worth  of 
property  and  the  loss  of  a  score  of  lives.  The  increased  immi- 
gration of  the  later  forties  only  added  fuel  to  the  flames.  In 
1850  the  Nativists  formed  the  order  of  the  "Star-Spangled  Ban- 
ner," which  grew  within  five  years  into  the  powerful  political 
party  of  the  "Know-No things,"  or  "Native  Americans,"1  elect- 

irThe  party  had  secret  grips  and  passwords,  like  the  Masonic  lodges.  When 
asked  about  it  the  members  were  ordered  to  reply,  "  I  know  nothing."  We  shall 
notice  the  political  influence  of  the  party  in  the  next  section. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  471 

ing  governors  and  controlling  legislatures  in  several  of  the  states 
of  the  Union. 

The  boiling  over  of  the  "melting-pot,"  however,  was  after  all 
only  a  sign  of  trifling  disorder  in  the  midst  of  the  general  pros- 
perity in  the  America  of  1850.  Capital  was  abundant,  and  new 
opportunities  for  investment  were  opening  on  every  hand.  The 
discovery  of  gold  in  California  in  1848,  followed  in  1851  by  the 
uncovering  of  large  gold  deposits  in  Australia, provided  an  ample 
specie  basis  for  a  circulating  medium  proportioned  to  a  rapidly 
expanding  volume  of  business.  Statistics  carefully  gathered  for 
the  first  time  in  the  census  of  1850  showed  that  manufactures 
had  already  passed  agricultural  products  in  value,  the  respective 
figures  for  the  year  being  $1,055,511,000  and  $994,000,000.  In 
the  industrial  region  bounded  roughly  west  and  south  by  the 
Wabash,  the  Ohio,  and  the  Potomac  Rivers  the  number  of  mill 
and  factory  operatives  was  increasing  by  tens  of  thousands 
yearly.  The  annual  production  of  flour  and  meal  exceeded 
$100,000,000;  cotton  goods,  lumber,  and  shoes  each  passed 
the  $50,000,000  mark;  and  the  value  of  leather,  woolens, 
and  machinery  manufactured  was  between  $25,000,000  and 
$50,000,000.  The  age  of  small  production,  supplying  narrow 
local  markets  and  preserving  something  still  of  the  apprentice 
system,  was  definitely  over.  The  extension  of  railroad-building, 
the  use  of  anthracite  coal  for  smelting,1  low  tariffs,2  a  swell- 
ing merchant  marine,  unbounded  confidence  and  inventive 

1  There  were  but  six  anthracite  furnaces  in   1840.     Fifteen  years  later  the 
number  had  grown  to  120,  and  anthracite  had  displaced  charcoal  as  the  chief 
smel ting-fuel.   Until  1844  we  imported  the  rails  for  our  4000  miles  of  railroad 
from  Europe,  and  in  the  year  1850  we  turned  out  but  85,000  tons  of  iron.  Before 
the  close  of  Pierce's  administration   (1857)    we  were  producing   180,000  tons 
annually.  More  than  half  of  this  product  came  from  the  Pennsylvania  foundries. 

2  From  the  second  war  with  England  to  the  Mexican  War  the  condition  of 
the  United  States  Treasury  was  fluctuating.   A  disordered  currency,  tariff  con- 
troversies, wild  speculation  in  public  lands,  and  reckless  state  banking  kept  the 
public  finances   continuously   disturbed.    But  after   1846   they   steadied  down. 
Prices  of  staples,  like  cotton  and  wheat,  became  more  regular.    Business  gained 
confidence.   A  surplus  of  from  $5,000,000  to  $10,000,000  came  into  the  Treasury 
annually  under  the  Walker  tariff  of  1846  (the  first  of  our  modern  "scientific" 
tariffs,  with  divisions  into  schedules) . 


472  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ingenuity,1  were  some  of  the  chief  elements  in  our  economic 
prosperity  in  the  decade  following  the  Compromise  measures 
of  1850. 

Although  this  period  saw  the  transition  from  small  manu- 
factures to  large-scale  production,  it  was  not  yet  marked  by 
those  glaring  inequalities  of  wealth  which  characterize  the  in- 
dustrial world  in  this  later  age  of  the  "  soulless  corporation." 
Comfort,  if  not  wealth,  was  widespread.  Neither  the  capitalist 
at  one  end  of  the  economic  scale  nor  the  laborer  at  the  other  end 
was  so  far  removed  in  condition  from  the  general  public  as  to  re- 
gard himself  as  a  member  of  a  " class"  whose  special  interest 
must  be  savagely  fought  for  at  whatever  expense  to  the  ultimate 
consumer.  A  distinguished  European  engineer  who  traveled 
through  the  industrial  parts  of  our  country  a  few  years  before 
the  Civil  War  was  impressed  with  "the  wide  expanse  and  abun- 
dant resources"  of  the  United  States,  but  much  more  with  the 
" absence  of  pauperism."  "Nothing  is  more  striking  to  a  Eu- 
ropean," he  wrote,  "than  the  universal  appearance  of  respecta- 
bility of  all  classes  in  America.  You  see  no  rags,  you  meet 
no  beggars." 

Manufactures  and  shipping  made  the  prosperity  of  the  North. 
The  West  with  its  boundless  lands  was  developing  a  varied  agri- 
culture, supplying  food  to  the  plantations  of  the  South  and  raw 
wool  and  hemp  to  the  factories  of  the  East.  Cotton  was  the 
wealth  of  the  South.  Year  after  year  this  staple  had  been  in- 
creasing at  the  expense  of  farm  products  in  the  older  states  of 
the  South  and  monopolizing  the  newly  opened  lands  of  the  Gulf 
shore  and  the  lower  Mississippi  Valley.  The  crop  grew  from 
1,500,000  bales  in  1840  to  2,500,000  bales  in  1850.  In  the  next 
decade  it  increased  to  5,000,000  bales — seven  eighths  of  the 
world's  supply.  But  even  this  enormous  yield  did  not  fully  meet 

irThe  record  of  the  Patent  Office  is  a  good  index  of  American  prosperity. 
During  the  first  generation  of  our  national  history,  patents  averaged  less  than 
150  a  year.  They  grew  to  544  by  1830,  and  the  decade  1840-1850  saw  the 
patenting  of  5942  new  American  inventions,  including  the  steam  hammer,  the 
sewing-machine,  the  telegraph,  and  the  rotary  press.  In  the  decade  1850-1860 
the  patents  jumped  to  23,140,  a  number  now  exceeded  every  year. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  473 

the  demands  of  the  factories  of  Europe  and  the  New  England 
States.  The  average  production  per  slave  rose  from  109  pounds 
in  1820  to  325  pounds  in  1850.  The  steady  trend  of  the  negro 
population  to  the  lower  South,1  an  increase  of  100  per  cent  in  the 
price  of  sound  field  hands,2  and  the  persistent  effort  of  the  great 
planters  to  reopen  the  African  slave  trade  all  show  how  com- 
pletely the  cotton  interests  dominated  the  life  of  the  Southland. 
The  section  was  an  economic  unit.  Because  the  raw  cotton  sent 
abroad  in  1850  constituted  nearly  50  per  cent  of  the  exports  of 
the  United  States,3  and  the  bills  of  exchange  were  largely  paid 
in  imports  to  New  York,  Boston,  Philadelphia,  and  Baltimore, 
the  Southerners  maintained  that  it  was  their  plantations  that 
were  enriching  the  country.  " Cotton  is  King!  "  they  said.  "In 
the  3,000,000  bags  of  cotton  that  slave  labor  annually  throws 
upon  the  world  we  are  doing  more  to  advance  civilization  than 
all  the  canting  philanthropists  of  New  and  Old  England  will  do 
in  a  century." 

Yet  there  was  another  side  to  the  picture.  The  plantation 
system  polarized  society  in  the  South.  Of  the  5,500,000  whites 
of  that  section  only  350,000  were  owners  of  slaves,  and  of  these 
over  1 70,000  owned  less  than  five  slaves  apiece.  The  great  plan- 
tation lords,  who  monopolized  the  wealth  of  the  South  even  more 
completely  than  the  trust  magnates  monopolize  the  wealth  of 
the  country  today,  numbered  not  more  than  5000  families.  They 
naturally  became  a  "caste,"  controlling  the  political,  economic, 

ipor  example,  the  300,000  slaves  in  Virginia  in  1790  had  grown  to  but 
450,000  in  1850,  although  the  natural  rate  of  increase  would  indicate  a  slave 
population  of  at  least  1,500,000  at  the  latter  date.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
30,000  slaves  of  Mississippi  in  1820  increased  to  150,000  by  1850,  or  more  than 
double  the  number  to  be  expected  from  census  predictions.  It  is  estimated  that 
over  2,000,000  negroes  were  sent  South  from  the  border  states  of  Virginia,  Ken- 
tucky, Delaware,  and  Maryland  during  the  decade  1850-1860. 

2 In  1845  a  good  negro  slave  was  worth  about  $750.  In  1858  seven  slaves 
were  sold  at  auction  in  New  Orleans,  without  a  guaranty,  at  an  average  price 
of  $1538  apiece  (W.  E.  Dodd,  "The  Cotton  Kingdom,"  page  26). 

3De  Bow,  in  his  "Statistical  Review  of  the  United  States"  (1854,  p.  188), 
gives  the  total  exports  as  $235,000,000,  of  which  cotton  formed  $112,315,317, 
manufactures  $21,296,498,  flour  $10,524,331,  tobacco  $9,219,251,  and  beef  and 
pork  $6,657,973. 


474  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

social,  educational,  and  religious  life  of  the  section.  Diversity 
of  profitable  industry  was  lacking,  and  slave  labor  excluded  the 
immigrant.  The  planter  sold  cotton  to  buy  lands  and  slaves,  to 
raise  more  cotton,  to  sell  for  more  land  and  slaves.  As  the  in- 
tensive  cultivation  of  the  crop  exhausted  the  soil  rapidly,  the 
planters  were  always  in  search  of  fresh  lands.  Cuba  and  Cen- 
tral America  tempted  them  with  the  vision  of  new  slave  states.1 
Measured  not  by  the  specious  index  of  the  exports  of  a  staple 
commodity  which  enriched  a  few  planters,  but  by  the  general 
diffusion  of  prosperity  among  its  white  population,  the  South 
was  poor  in  1850. 

Over  60  per  cent  of  the  land  in  New  England  was  improved, 
as  against  2  7  per  cent  in  the  states  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's 
line.  Land  values  in  the  free  states  averaged  $25.30  an  acre, 
to  $9.28  in  the  slave  states.  Of  the  $1,019,107,000  worth  of 
manufactured  goods,  $845,430,430  worth  (approximately  83  per 
cent)  were  turned  out  by  Northern  plants.  The  cotton  mills 
yielded  a  product  worth  $65,501,689,  over  two  thirds  of  which 
came  from  New  England.  Virginia  and  Georgia  alone  of  the 
slave  states  manufactured  as  much  as  $1,000,000  worth  of  cot- 
ton. The  deposits  in  the  banks  of  the  cotton  belt  amounted  to 
but  $20,000,000  in  1850,  showing  a  great  lack  of  fluid  capital. 
Only  in  new  cotton  regions  was  the  return  on  capital  as  high 
as  in  the  manufacturing  and  shipping  states.  The  great  sums 
which  came  into  the  Southern  ports  in  payment  for  raw  cotton 
did  not  remain  as  a  fund  for  diversified  investment.  Such  part 
as  was  not  laid  out  in  new  lands  and  slaves  was  virtually  held 
in  trust  for  Northern  capitalists  and  middlemen,  through  whom 
the  imports  to  the  South  were  handled.  On  the  eve  of  the  Civil 
War,  New  York  City  alone  had  twice  as  much  money  on  deposit 
as  all  the  states  of  the  South  together. 

Much  emphasis  has  been  laid  by  historians  of  social  condi- 
tions on  the  intellectual  superiority  of  the  North.  A  study  of 
the  census  figures  for  1850  confirms  this  judgment  in  some 

1See  pages  462-465  for  designs  on  Cuba.  The  astonishing  career  of  the  fili- 
busterer  William  Walker  in  Nicaragua  is  another  chapter  in  the  program  of  the 
slavery  expansionists  (T.  C.  Smith,  "Parties  and  Slavery,"  pp.  252-253). 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  475 

respects  and  corrects  it  in  others.  The  public-school  system 
of  the  North  was  far  better  developed  and  more  liberally  sup- 
ported. In  the  free  states  62,571  schools  were  allotted  $5,794,- 
499  of  taxes  and  public  funds,  as  against  18,407  schools  with 
$1,230,999  in  the  slave  states.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
South  had  120  colleges,  with  12,602  students,  to  119  colleges, 
with  15,119  students,  in  the  North.1  The  total  income  from 
higher  institutions  of  learning  was  larger  in  Virginia  ($150,000) 
than  in  New  York  ($148,000),  in  Kentucky  ($131,000)  than 
in  Ohio  ($125,000),  in  Maryland  ($112,000)  than  in  Massa- 
chusetts ($107,000).  Louisiana  spent  $25,000  of  her  public 
funds  on  colleges,  South  Carolina  $41,000,  and  Virginia  $90,000 ; 
while  the  figures  for  Massachusetts,  Maine,  and  New  York 
respectively  were  $5000,  $6000,  and  $12,000.  In  the  Southern 
states  72  daily  newspapers  were  published,  as  against  182  in 
the  North,  New  York  alone  having  51.  Only  152  public  li- 
braries are  enumerated  in  the  slave  states,  to  1065  in  the  North, 
of  which  Michigan  boasted  280  and  Massachusetts  177.  Among 
the  13,330,658  white  inhabitants  of  the  free  states  there  were 
449,816  illiterates  (approximately  i  in  30),  while  513,082  of 
the  6,222,418  whites  of  the  South  (about  i  in  12)  could  neither 
read  nor  write.  The  statistics  of  crime,  however,  tell  another 
story.  New  York  had  1288  convicts  in  her  prisons  on  June  8, 
1850,  and  Massachusetts  had  1236;  but  the  largest  figures  for 
the  slave  states  were  423  for  Louisiana  and  313  for  Virginia. 
Culture,  like  wealth,  in  the  South  was  not  diffused.  It  tended 
more  and  more  to  be  the  exclusive  privilege  of  the  planter  class. 
The  census  of  1860  shows  an  increase  of  more  than  100  per 
cent  over  the  figures  of  1850  in  the  income  of  the  higher  institu- 
tions of  learning  of  the  slave  states,  with  little  or  no  growth 
in  the  public  schools. 

The  backward  economic  condition  of  the  South  was  a  mat- 
ter of  great  concern  to  the  men  of  that  section.  An  address 
presented  to  a  convention  of  the  Virginia  State  Agricultural 
Society  in  1852,  referring  to  the  census  of  1850,  said :  "In  the 

xlt  must  be  remembered  also  that  many  Southern  youth  were  educated  in 
Northern  colleges. 


476  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

above  figures  we  find  no  cause  for  self-gratulation.  They  show 
that  we  have  not  done  our  part  in  bringing  the  land  into  culti- 
vation. ...  As  other  states  accumulate  the  means  of  material 
greatness  and  glide  past  us  on  the  road  to  wealth  and  empire, 
we  slight  the  warnings  of  dull  statistics  and  drive  lazily  along 
the  field  of  ancient  customs."  Governor  Wise,  of  the  same 
state,  wrote  seven  years  later:  "Commerce  has  long  since 
spread  her  sails  and  sailed  away  from  you.  You  have  not  as 
yet  dug  more  than  enough  coal  to  warm  yourselves  at  your 
own  hearths.  .  .  .  You  have  not  yet  spun  coarse  cotton  enough 
to  clothe  your  own  slaves."  The  Lynchburg  Virginian  wrote  in 
1852,  "Dependent  on  England  and  the  North  for  almost  every 
yard  of  cloth,  and  every  coat,  boot,  and  hat  we  wear ;  for  our 
axes,  scythes,  tubs,  and  buckets,  in  short,  for  everything  except 
our  bread  and  meat,  it  must  occur  to  the  South  that  if  our 
relations  with  the  North  should  ever  be  severed  ...  we  would 
be  reduced  to  a  state  more  abject  than  we  are  willing  to  look 
at  even  prospectively."  "The  finest  ship  timber  in  the  world," 
said  the  New  Orleans  Delta,  "is  cut  down  and  sent  to  Northern 
ship-yards  thousands  of  miles  off,  where  it  is  used  in  the  con- 
struction of  vessels,  many  of  which  come  back  here  to  engage 
in  the  transportation  of  Southern  produce.  In  1854  Maine 
built  168,632  tons  of  shipping,  and  Louisiana  1509  tons.  North 
Carolina,  which  was  one  of  the  banner  ship-building  states  in 
the  early  days  of  the  Union,  constructed  but  2532  tons  in  1854, 
to  over  90,000  tons  for  Massachusetts."  Economists  like  De 
Bow  urged  the  building  of  mills  and  factories1  and  the  appro- 
priation of  public  money  for  the  improvement  of  roads,  rivers, 
and  harbors.  Commercial  conventions,  which  were  held  fre- 
quently in  the  decade  1850-1860,  proposed  hundreds  of  meas- 
ures for  the  economic  salvation  of  the  South ;  but  no  voice  was 
raised  in  protest  against  the  system  which  made  all  these  pro- 
posals futile.  Slavery  must  be  not  only  maintained  but  ex- 

!"A  part  of  our  force  must  be  taken  from  the  soil  and  put  into  the  mills. 
Spindles  and  looms  must  be  brought  to  the  cotton  fields"  (J.  D.  B.  De  Bow, 
"Industrial  Resources  of  the  Southern  States,"  Vol.  I,  p.  229).  A  large  cotton 
mill  at  Sparta,  Georgia,  had  to  close  down  in  1855,  after  running  three  years. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  477 

tended.  The  industrial  " drive"  of  the  decade  was  a  failure. 
On  the  eve  of  the  war  the  South  was  manufacturing  but  4  per 
cent  of  its  cotton  crop,  and  the  magnificent  iron  and  timber 
industries  which  now  enrich  the  states  of  Alabama  and  Georgia 
were  undreamed  of. 

No  better  index  of  the  prosperity  of  the  country  at  the  acces- 
sion of  President  Pierce  could  be  found  than  the  figures  of  the 
expansion  of  our  commerce  by  sea  and  land.  A  number  of 
events  in  the  late  forties  had  given  encouragement  to  American 
shipping.  The  Walker  tariff  of  1846  inaugurated  an  era  ,of 
moderate  customs  rates  which  lasted  till  the  Civil  War.  The 
revolutions  of  the  year  1848  in  central  and  western  Europe 
gave  the  opportunity  that  continental  wars  always  furnished 
for  the  increase  of  American  trade.  The  same  year  gold  was 
discovered  in  California,  and  the  great  migration  to  the  Pacific 
coast  began.  The  only  practical  way  for  the  transportation  of 
freight  was  the  long  loop  around  Cape  Horn.  Within  two  years 
after  the  discovery  of  gold  the  fast  California  clippers  were 
doubling  the  Cape  and  reaching  the  Golden  Gate  in  a  little 
more  than  a  hundred  days  out  from  Boston  and  New  York, 
sometimes  earning  enough  by  a  single  voyage  to  pay  for  the 
ship.  Great  Britain  repealed  the  last  of  her  Navigation  Acts  in 
1850,  and  the  lucrative  trade  of  the  East  Indies  was  freely 
opened  to  the  world.  The  ponderous  and  privileged  old  "India- 
men,"  at  once  passenger  ships,  freighters,  transports,  and  men- 
of-war,  gave  place  to  the  swift  packet  boats.  Then  an  exciting 
rivalry  began  between  the  Yankee  clipper  and  the  new  British 
vessel  built  on  her  model  for  the  carrying  trade  in  the  tea  and 
spices  of  the  Orient.1 

Following  England's  example  of  1839  m  subsidizing  the 
newly  projected  steamship  line  of  Samuel  Cunard  for  carrying 
the  mails,  Congress  voted  in  1853  an  annual  subvention  of 

*A  club  of  Boston  merchants  challenged  the  British  shippers  in  1852  to  a  race 
from  England  to  China  and  back  for  a  purse  of  $50,000.  The  Yankee  clippers 
frequently  beat  the  Cunard  steamers  in  the  run  from  Liverpool  to  Sandy  Hook. 
Donald  McKay's  Lightning  established  a  record  of  436  sea  miles  in  a  day— 
which  was  not  equaled  by  transatlantic  steamers  for  twenty-five  years. 


478  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

$385,000  to  Edward  L.  Collins,  who  put  into  service  four 
paddle-wheel  steamers  which  promised  for  a  moment  to  transfer 
to  the  United  States  the  supremacy  of  the  sea-borne  trade.1 
At  the  same  time  many  new  steamship  lines  were  established 
along  the  Atlantic  seaboard  and  down  to  Central  and  South 
America.  The  tonnage  on  the  Great  Lakes,  which  were  rapidly 
being  connected  with  the  coast  by  railroads,  increased  from 
75,000  to  215,000  between  1840  and  1850  and  jumped  to 
611,000  in  the  next  decade.  According  to  a  Senate  Executive 
Document2  the  tonnage  of  our  merchant  marine  in  the  year 
1853  exceeded  by  15  per  cent  that  of  Great  Britain.  The 
5>353?868  tons  of  American  shipping  in  the  foreign  and  domestic 
trade  in  1860  were  not  equaled  until  the  opening  of  the  twen- 
tieth century.  Over  70  per  cent  of  our  foreign  commerce  in 
the  decade  1850-1860  was  carried  in  American  ships. 

Most  wonderful  of  all  was  the  development  of  the  American 
railroads  in  the  early  fifties.  Until  the  middle  of  the  century 
short  stretches  of  iron  track  served  as  feeders  or  binding  points 
for  centers  of  navigation  on  rivers  and  canals.  In  the  twenty 
years  since  John  Quincy  Adams  had  turned  the  first  spadeful 
of  soil  in  the  construction  of  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railroad 
(July  4,  1829)  less  than  5000  miles  had  been  built.  But  the 
years  1850-1854  saw  the  mileage  increase  to  20,000.  The  chief 
feature  of  this  new  era  of  railroad-building  was  the  develop- 
ment of  "  trunk  lines"  connecting  the  Ohio  and  Mississippi  val- 
leys and  the  Great  Lakes  with  the  Atlantic  seaboard.  In  May, 
1851,  the  Erie  railroad  was  opened,  with  telegraph  wires  along 
the  road,  from  Piermont  (near  Nyack)  on  the  Hudson  to  Dun- 
kirk near  Lake  Erie,  the  event  being  celebrated  by  a  trip  of 

iThe  steamers  of  the  Collins  line — the  Atlantic,  the  Pacific,  the  Baltic,  and  the 
Arctic — made  the  voyage  in  nine  or  ten  days,  clipping  about  twenty-four  hours 
off  the  Cunarders'  time.  But  unfortunately  the  Pacific  and  the  Arctic  went 
down,  and  Congress,  with  a  short-sightedness  only  too  common  in  its  dealing 
with  an  American  merchant  marine,  withdrew  its  financial  support  after  five 
years  of  the  experiment. 

2  Of  the  Thirty-ninth  Congress,  second  session,  p.  201.  A  report  to  the  Treas- 
ury Department  on  the  progress  of  shipbuilding  in  the  United  States  just  after 
the  Civil  War. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF          479 

Daniel  Webster  and  the  other  members  of  Fillmore's  cabinet 
over  the  entire  460  miles.  The  same  year  the  Hudson  River  road 
reached  Albany,  and  two  years  later  the  eleven  independent 
roads  between  New  York  and  Buffalo  were  consolidated  into 
the  New  York  Central.  The  Pennsylvania  road,  chartered  in 
1846,  ran  its  first  through  train  from  Philadelphia  to  Pittsburgh 
in  1852,  and  the  next  year  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio  reached  its 
western  terminus  at  Wheeling,  on  the  Ohio.  The  year  of  Pierce's 
inauguration  saw  also  the  Grand  Trunk  line  opened  between 
Portland  and  Montreal,  and  the  construction  of  the  Cleveland- 
Toledo  line  along  the  Lake  Shore,  which  established  all-rail 
connections  between  Chicago  and  the  East.  In  1855  St.  Louis 
and  New  York  were  joined  by  rail.1 

Although  the  federal  government  was  committed  by  long 
years  of  Democratic  rule  to  opposition  to  internal  improve- 
ments at  national  expense,  so  important  was  the  demand  for 
federal  aid  in  railroad-building  that  Congress  yielded  so  far 
as  to  grant  public  lands  to  the  states,  to  be  turned  over  to  the 
railroads.  Illinois  received  2,595,453  acres  in  1850  for  the 
Illinois  Central  Railroad,  which  was  to  connect  Chicago  with 
the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  Mississippi,  Alabama,  Missouri,  Arkansas, 
Florida,  Louisiana,  Michigan,  Wisconsin,  and  Iowa  were  all 
recipients  of  large  grants  in  the  next  half-dozen  years.  Alto- 
gether Congress  donated  some  20,000,000  acres  in  the  decade 
1850-1860.  States,  counties,  and  cities  supplemented  the  fed- 
eral grants,  while  bankers  and  promoters  borrowed  heavily  from 
the  financiers  of  London  and  Paris.  It  is  estimated  that  some 
$450,000,000  of  European  capital  was  invested  in  American 
railroads  on  the  eve  of  the  Civil  War.  States  like  Illinois,  Iowa, 
and  Wisconsin  were  doubling  in  population  each  decade,  and 


American  Railway  Times  gives  the  following  statistics  of  mileage  in 
the  chief  railroad  states  at  the  close  of  1854:  Ohio,  47  roads  with  2927  miles; 
Illinois,  31  roads  with  2667  miles  ;  New  York,  32  roads  with  2625  miles  ;  Penn- 
sylvania, 69  roads  with  1992  miles  ;  Indiana,  39  roads  with  1453  miles  ;  Massa- 
chusetts, 39  roads  with  1293  miles.  Of  the  16,500  miles  built  in  the  period 
1849-1857  the  distribution,  according  to  the  Miscellaneous  Statistics  of  the 
eighth  census,  was  as  follows  :  Northwestern  States,  7500  ;  New  England  States, 
4000;  South  Atlantic  States,  2750;  South  Interior  States,  2150. 


480  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  rapid  rise  in  value  of  lands  along  their  completed  and 
projected  lines  made  investment  attractive. 

As  the  East  reached  out  to  the  West,  the  West  reached  out 
to  the  Pacific.  Asa  Whitney  o^  Michigan  was  the  pioneer 
promoter  of  a  Pacific  railroad.  After  laboring  for  ten  years 
he  got  the  House  Committee  on  Roads  and  Canals  to  report 
favorably  on  a  plan  in  1852  to  put  at  his  disposal  a  strip  of 
land  sixty  miles  wide  from  the  Mississippi  to  the  coast,  which 
he  was  to  sell  to  settlers.  Out  of  the  proceeds  he  was  to  build 
a  railroad  and  eventually  refund  the  government  ten  cents  an 
acre  for  the  land.  Nothing  came  of  this  ambitious  scheme  of 
Whitney's,  but  projects  were  multiplied  for  building  the  iron 
road  where  but  lately  the  stagecoach  line  had  been  established.1 
The  promoters  of  the  hustling  Northwest  wanted  Chicago  for 
the  terminal.  The  rival  St.  Louisans  celebrated  the  Fourth  of 
July,  1851,  by  breaking  ground  for  a  Pacific  road  and  actually 
sent  the  first  steam  train  west  of  the  Mississippi  over  the  few 
completed  miles  of  track  eighteen  months  later.  The  men  of 
the  cotton  states  hoped  to  link  Memphis  or  New  Orleans  with 
San  Francisco  by  a  railroad  passing  through  Arkansas,  Texas, 
and  New  Mexico.  In  spite  of  his  strict  constructionist  prin- 
ciples inherited  from  Calhoun,  Jefferson  Davis,  Pierce's  Secre- 
tary of  War,  found  the  authority,  under  the  plea  of  "  national 
defense,"  to  promote  the  Memphis-Santa  Fe  scheme.  James 
Gadsden,  a  railroad  president  of  South  Carolina,  was  made  our 
minister  to  Mexico  for  the  express  purpose  of  purchasing  the 
land  south  of  New  Mexico  containing  the  lowest  pass  over  the 
Rockies.  He  returned  in  the  autumn  of  1853  with  the  Gads- 
den  Purchase  of  50,000  square  miles,  acquired  at  a  cost  of 
$10,000,000.  Congress  went  so  far  as  to  authorize  surveys  of 
routes  at  public  cost,  in  the  Rusk  Bill  of  1853,  but  all  plans 

*In  1851  monthly  stages  from  Independence,  Kansas,  to  Santa  Fe  were 
started,  the  stages  built  water-tight  for  fording  streams.  Frederick  Law  Olm- 
stead  tells  in  his  "Journey  in  the  Seaboard  Slave  States"  (Vol.  II,  p.  5)  of 
crossing  a  cypress  swamp  in  a  stage  with  holes  bored  in  the  floor.  The  pas- 
sengers climbed  to  the  top  when  the  vehicle  struck  deep  water,  and  came  back 
to  their  seats  after  the  flood  had  been  drained  off. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  481 

of  peaceful  expansion  were  adjourned  by  the  approach  of 
the  great  struggle  between  the  North  and  the  South. 

The  effect  of  this  era  of  railroad-building,  which  carried  the 
connections  from  the  Eastern  seaports  to  nearly  a  score  of 
points  on  the  Mississippi,  the  Ohio,  and  the  Lakes,  was  momen- 
tous for  our  history.  It  revolutionized  our  economic  and  polit- 
ical geography.  The  old  lines  of  trade  ran  north  and  south  on 
both  sides  of  the  Alleghenies,  by  the  coasting-routes  and  canals 
of  the  Atlantic  seaboard  and  by  the  Mississippi  River  system. 
The  agricultural  products  of  the  Northwest  went  down  the  river 
to  Memphis,  Natchez,  Baton  Rouge,  and  New  Orleans,  where 
they  were  sold  to  the  planters  or  reshipped  on  Gulf  or  ocean 
steamers.  In  the  early  forties  New  Orleans  was  the  fifth  city 
in  size  in  the  country,  and  second  only  to  New  York  in  the  ex- 
port trade.  Over  2000  steamers  arrived  at  her  levees  annually, 
carrying  half  a  million  tons  of  freight,  valued  at  $50,000,000. 
The  total  commerce  of  the  " Western  waters"  was  estimated 
at  $100,000,000.  But  the  coming  of  the  railroad  shifted  the 
routes  of  trade.  The  barrier  of  the  Alleghenies  sank.  After 
1850,  wheat  could  be  brought  from  the  Northwest  by  lake  and 
rail  to  the  Atlantic  ports  for  17  cents  a  bushel  and  flour  for 
80  cents  a  barrel.  The  region  which  had  produced  tens  of 
millions  of  bushels  of  grain  to  feed  the  South  now  began  to 
produce  hundreds  of  millions  to  feed  Europe.  Our  exports  of 
grain,  encouraged  by  the  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  in  England 
in  1846,  the  abolition  of  the  last  Navigation  Acts  in. 1850,  and 
the  interruption  of  the  Russian  wheat  supply  by  the  Crimean 
War,  increased  158  per  cent  in  the  decade  following  Franklin 
Pierce's  inauguration.  By  1860  the  export  of  grain  from  New 
Orleans  had  dropped  to  2189  bushels,  while  43,211,488  bushels 
were  shipped  eastward  from  the  Lake  Michigan  ports  alone. 
The  once  enormous  export  trade  of  the  Queen  City  of  the  South 
was  now  confined  to  cotton,  sugar,  tobacco,  and  rice. 

The  political  effect  of  this  shifting  of  economic  lines  to  run 
east  and  west  instead  of  north  and  south  showed  more  and 
more  clearly  in  the  ten  years  preceding  the  Civil  War.  Political 
allegiance  tends  to  follow  material  interests.  "In  1847  not  a 


482  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

line  of  railroad  entered  Chicago ;  its  population  numbered  about 
25,000,  and  its  property  valuation  approximated  $7,000,000. 
Ten  years  later  4000  miles  of  railway  connected  with  all  points 
of  the  compass  a  city  of  nearly  100,000  people,  and  property 
valuations  had  increased  500  per  cent."1  What  was  true  of 
Chicago  was  true  only  in  less  degree  of  the  other  Lake  cities,— 
like  Buffalo,  Cleveland,  Toledo,  and  Detroit, — whose  amazing 
growth  during  the  decade  1850-1860  was  due  to  Eastern  capital 
and  Eastern  merchants,  bankers,  and  promoters.  With  the 
invoices  and  bills  of  lading  there  went  to  these  Western  centers 
also  the  ideas  and  ideals  of  the  East — Emerson's  quiet  enthu- 
siasm for  democracy,  Whittier's  quenchless  love  of  freedom, 
Lowell's  satire,  and  Greeley's  scorn.  It  was  only  when  the  test 
of  the  sections  came  in  1861  that  the  full  meaning  of  the  shift- 
ing of  the  economic  affiliations  of  the  Northwest  from  South  to 
East  were  realized — though  penetrating  Southerners  saw  them 
clearly  and  tried  to  hasten  secession  by  a  decade. 

Other  counsels  prevailed.  The  vast  majority  of  American 
citizens,  North  and  South,  determined  that  harmony  must  be 
maintained  and  the  Union  preserved.  If  the  tone  of  confidence 
was  pitched  so  high  that  it  sometimes  broke  into  querulousness, 
it  was  only  the  relief  from  the  strain  of  a  decade  filled  with 
strife.  If  the  constant  reiteration,  in  the  fervid  oratory  of  the 
period,  of  the  impossibility  of  a  dissolution  of  the  Union  seems 
rather  to  betray  the  anxiety  which  it  denies,  it  was  only  a  par- 
donable impatience  that  all  Americans  should  leave  the  recent 
quarrel  behind  and  devote  themselves  with  zeal  to  the  mag- 
nificent prospect  ahead.  The  time  was  ripe  for  reaping  the 
harvest  of  America's  matchless  material  resources.  The  Treas- 
ury was  full,  commerce  was  expanding,  cities  were  springing 
up,  mills  and  factories  were  humming,  banks  were  multiplying, 
credit  was  easy,  and  capital  was  abundant.  The-  halcyon  days 
had  dawned.  After  the  bitter  strife  of  the  Compromise  year 
there  was  peace — the  business  man's  peace.  In  his  first  message 
to  Congress,  in  December,  1853,  President  Pierce  spoke  of  "the 

1  Archer  B.  Hulbert,  "The  Paths  of  Inland  Commerce"  (Chronicles  of  America, 
Vol.  XXI),  p.  172. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  483 

sense  of  repose  and  security  to  the  public  mind"  which  had 
been  restored  to  all  parts  of  our  country,  adding,  "That  this 
repose  is  to  suffer  no  shock  during  my  official  term,  if  I  have 
the  power  to  prevent  it,  those  who  placed  me  here  may  be  as- 
sured." Less  than  fifty  days  later  Pierce  was  closeted  with 
Stephen  A.  Douglas,  chairman  of  the  Senate  Committee  on 
Territories,  and  a  few  other  members  of  Congress  in  lending 
the  executive  approval  to  a  measure  which  was  destined  not 
only  to  disturb  the  country's  repose  but  to  head  it  straight 
toward  civil  war. 

THE  REPEAL  OF  THE  MISSOURI  COMPROMISE 

That  part  of  the  Louisiana  Purchase  territory  lying  west 
and  north  of  the  states  of  Missouri  and  Iowa  was  known  as 
Nebraska  in  1850.  It  was  a  vast  unorganized  region  of  485,000 
square  miles,  larger  than  the  combined  area  of  all  the  free 
states  in  the  Union  excepting  California.  It  contained  less  than 
1000  white  inhabitants,  and  our  government  had  allotted  to 
various  Indian  tribes  large  tracts  in  the  smiling  valleys  of  the 
Platte  and  Kansas  Rivers.  The  overland  migration  to  Cali- 
fornia, which  had  followed  the  discovery  of  gold,  together  with 
the  nascent  plans  for  a  Pacific  railroad,  had  brought  the  zone 
of  this  region  immediately  west  of  Missouri  and  Iowa  to  the 
public  notice  in  the  early  fifties.  A  bill  for  the  organization 
of  the  Nebraska  Territory  passed  the  House  in  the  last  session 
of  Fillmore's  term,  but  Congress  expired  (March  4,  1853) 
before  a  vote  was  reached  in  the  Senate. 

A  few  days  after  the  assembling  of  President  Pierce's  first 
Congress,  Senator  A.  C.  Dodge  of  Iowa  introduced  a  bill  for 
the  organization  of  Nebraska,  which  was  referred  to  the  Com- 
mittee on  Territories,  Stephen  A.  Douglas  chairman.  The  bill 
was  reported  on  January  4,  1854,  with  the  following  fateful 
amendments : 

Section  21.  And  be  it  further  enacted,  That  in  order  to  avoid  all 
misconstruction,  it  is  hereby  declared  to  be  the  true  intent  and  mean- 
ing of  this  act,  so  far  as  the  question  of  slavery  is  concerned,  to 


484  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

carry  into  practical  operation  the  propositions  and  principles  estab- 
lished by  the  Compromise  Measures  of  1850,  to  wit: 

First,  that  all  questions  pertaining  to  slavery  in  the  Territories 
and  the  new  States  to  be  formed  therefrom,  are  to  be  left  to  the 
decision  of  the  people  residing  therein,  through  their  appropriate 
representatives. 

Second,  that  all  cases  involving  title  to  slaves  and  questions  of  per- 
sonal property  are  referred  to  the  adjudication  of  the  local  tribunals, 
with  the  right  of  appeal  to  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States. 

Third,  that  the  provisions  of  the  Constitution  and  the  Laws  of  the 
United  States  in  respect  to  fugitives  from  service  are  to  be  carried 
into  faithful  execution  in  all  the  organized  Territories  the  same  as 
in  the  States. 

It  will  be  noticed  that  the  Missouri  Compromise,  by  which 
the  land  in  question  had  been  dedicated  to  freedom  thirty-four 
years  before,  is  not  mentioned  in  the  amendments,  although 
it  is  practically  annulled  by  their  provisions.  When  Archibald 
Dixon,  a  Whig  senator  from  Kentucky,  announced  his  inten- 
tion of  introducing  an  amendment  expressly  repealing  the  Mis- 
souri Compromise,  Douglas  consented  to  the  change.  Only, 
knowing  that  it  would  arouse  great  antagonism  at  the  North, 
he  insisted  on  having  the  backing  of  the  administration.  This 
he  obtained  in  the  conference  with  Pierce  mentioned  at  the  close 
of  the  last  section.  The  day  after  the  conference  (January  24) 
Douglas  substituted  for  the  Nebraska  Bill  a  Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill,  providing  for  two  territories  divided  by  the  thirty-seventh 
parallel  of  latitude.  It  was  the  tacit  understanding  that  slavery 
should  go  into  the  southern  territory  of  Kansas  and  be  kept 
out  of  the  northern  territory  of  Nebraska.  The  bill  declared 
that  "the  eighth  section  of  the  act  preparatory  to  the  admission 
of  Missouri  into  the  Union"  (a  section  excluding  slavery  from 
the  Louisiana  Purchase  north  of  the  line  of  36°  30')  was  "su- 
perseded by  the  principles  of  the  legislation  of  1850,  com- 
monly called  the  Compromise  Measures,"  and  was  therefore 
"inoperative."1 

xBy  a  later  amendment  the  wording  "superseded  by"  was  changed  to  "incon- 
sistent with,"  and  "inoperative"  was  changed  to  "inoperative  and  void." 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  485 

The  opposition  to  the  proposed  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Com- 
promise, which  Douglas  foresaw,  was  not  slow  in  appearing. 
On  the  day  after  he  introduced  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill  an 
address  known  as  "The  Appeal  of  the  Independent  Democrats" 
was  published  over  the  signatures  of  Senators  Chase,  Sumner, 
Wade,  Smith,  and  De  Witt.  It  denounced  the  bill  as  "a  gross 
violation  of  a  sacred  pledge"  and  a  "part  and  parcel  of  an 
atrocious  plot  to  exclude  from  a  vast  and  unoccupied  region 
immigrants  from  the  Old  World  and  free  laborers  from  our  own 
States,  and  to  convert  it  into  a  dreary  region  of  despotism  in- 
habited by  masters  and  slaves."  It  declared  that  "the  dearest 
interests  of  the  people  were  made  the  mere  hazards  of  a  presi- 
dential game,"  the  action  of  the  Illinois  senator  being  "a  bid 
for  Southern  support  in  the  next  Democratic  convention."  The 
influential  newspapers  of  the  North  condemned  the  bill.  From 
mass  meetings  and  state  legislatures  came  stirring  resolutions 
of  protest.  Douglas  himself  declared  that  he  "could  travel 
from  Boston  to  Chicago  by  the  light  of  his  burning  effigies." 

But  Douglas  was  not  a  man  to  be  daunted  by  opposition. 
Aggressive,  ingenious,  confident,  plausible,  he  always  rose  to 
his  greatest  heights  as  the  fight  grew  harder.  Almost  unaided 
he  met  the  arguments  of  Wade,  Chase,  Sumner,  Seward,  and 
Everett  on  the  floor  of  the  Senate  day  after  day.  He  pushed  his 
bill  with  relentless  energy.  The  Compromise  Measures  of  1850 
had  lingered  six  months  in  Congress ;  Douglas  put  the  Kansas- 
Nebraska  Bill  through  the  Senate  in  39  days.  In  the  early 
morning  of  March  4,  1854,  after  a  final  debate  lasting  seven- 
teen hours,  the  vote  was  taken — 37  for,  14  against.  In  the 
House  the  preponderating  influence  of  the  North  delayed  the 
bill  for  more  than  two  months  longer;  but  finally  (May  22); 
under  the  skillful  management  of  Alexander  H.  Stephens,  it 
passed  by  the  narrow  margin  of  113  to  100  votes.  On  May  30 
President  Pierce  appended  his  signature. 

The  sinister  credit  for  putting  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill 
through  Congress  belongs  to  Stephen  A.  Douglas.  The  argu- 
ment of  his  report  and  of  his  speeches  on  the  subject  was  that 
the  country,  by  the  adoption  of  the  Compromise  of  1850,  had 


486  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

substituted  the  principle  of  "squatter  sovereignty"  for  that  of 
a  geographical  dividing  line  in  the  regulation  of  slavery  in  the 
territories.  He  boasted  that  the  new  principle  was  national, 
knowing  no  lines  nor  boundaries,  no  North  nor  South,  whereas 
the  old  line  of  36°  30'  sanctioned  the  division  of  the  country 
into  two  permanently  hostile  sections.  The  North,  he  said, 
had  refused  to  extend  the  line  of  36°  30'  through  the  new 
territory  acquired  by  the  Mexican  War,  thus  wisely  abandon- 
ing the  pernicious  principle  of  the  Missouri  Compromise.  He 
was  now  merely  arguing  for  their  consistent  support  of  the 
new  doctrine  which  had  brought  the  happy  solution  of  the 
slavery  question  in  the  Compromise  of  1850.  His  bill,  he  main- 
tained, was  in  strict  accord  with  the  pledges  and  platform  of 
the  triumphant  Democracy  of  1852. 

But  the  spuriousness  of  Douglas's  argument  is  obvious. 
There  was  no  hint  in  the  debates  of  1850  that  the  Compromise 
Measures  were  meant  to  apply  to  any  other  region  than  the 
territory  just  acquired  in  the  Mexican  War,  or  to  be  erected 
into  a  "principle"  to  "supersede"  any  former  legislation.  The 
Northern  votes  necessary  for  its  passage  could  never  have  been 
obtained  on  any  such  interpretation.  Clay  and  Webster,  to 
whose  efforts  the  success  of  the  Compromise  of  1850  was  due, 
would  not  have  spoken  a  word  in  its  behalf  if  they  had  supposed 
that  it  meant  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise.  Indeed, 
the  chief  argument  of  both  these  statesmen  for  the  application 
of  popular  sovereignty  to  Utah  and  New  Mexico  in  1850  was 
that  it  actually  would  not  mean  the  extension  of  slave  territory.1 
Douglas  had  the  audacity  to  argue  that  because  the  North 
refused  to  extend  the  line  of  36°  30'  through  the  Mexican  ces- 
sion, which  was  free  soil  under  Mexican  law,  it  therefore  had 
virtually  consented  to  abolish  the  36°  30'  line  in  the  Louisiana 
Purchase  territory !  In  other  words,  the  rejection  of  the  pro- 
posal to  legalize  slavery  south  of  36°  30'  in  New  Mexico  was 
equivalent  to  the  abandonment  of  the  prohibition  of  slavery 

!"They  [Clay  and  Webster]  bargained  with  slavery  not  for  the  purpose  of 
saving  it,  but  in  the  sure  confidence  that  it  would  die  a  natural  death." — Louis 
Rowland,  "Stephen  A.  Douglas,"  p.  93 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  487 

north, of  36°  30'  in  Nebraska.  Douglas's  crafty  attempt  to  use 
the  support  of  the  names  of  the  two  great  Whig  leaders  of  1850 
for  such  logic  was  exposed  by  his  adversaries  in  the  Senate, 
especially  by  Edward  Everett,  who  had  been  a  close  associate 
of  Webster's,  had  voted  for  the  Compromise  of  1850,  and  was 
a  member  of  Douglas's  committee  in  1854.  However,  Douglas's 
persistency  and  unrivaled  skill  in  debate  bore  down  all  opposi- 
tion. He  had  his  way  in  the  triumph  which  was  eventually 
to  wreck  his  own  political  career  and  to  bring  untold  woes  upon 
his  country. 

The  motives  which  impelled  Douglas  to  inject  the  fateful 
slavery  amendments  into  the  Nebraska  Bill  of  1854*  have 
been  the  subject  of  much  speculation  among  historians.  The 
most  widely  accepted  theory  is  that  expressed  by  Mr.  Rhodes 
(Vol.  I,  p.  430) ;  namely,  that  "the  action  of  the  Illinois  Senator 
was  a  bid  for  Southern  support  in  the  next  Democratic  conven- 
tion." There  is  no  doubt  that  Douglas  was  ambitious  for  the 
presidency.  There  is  no  doubt,  further,  that  the  men  who 
would  be  his  chief  competitors  for  the  nomination  in  1856  were 
all  courting  the  favor  of  the  South.2  But  this  is  not  enough 
to  prove  that  Douglas  sold  himself  to  the  South  in  1854  for 
a  mess  of  presidential  pottage.  In  spite  of  his  famous  remark 
in  1849  that  "the  Missouri  Compromise  was  canonized  in  the 
hearts  of  the  American  people,"  and  of  his  prediction  in  the 
debate  which  followed  that  the  land  stretching  from  the  Mis- 
souri to  the  Pacific  would  be  free  soil,  he  had  no  deep  ethical 
convictions  on  the  subject  of  slavery.  Again  and  again  we  have 
his  confession  that  he  "didn't  care  whether  slavery  was  voted 
up  or  voted  down."  He  did  care,  however,  a  great  deal  about 
the  organization  of  the  Western  territory,  the  quieting  of  Indian 

i-In  all  previous  attempts  to  organize  the  territory  of  Nebraska  (which  began 
with  a  bill  introduced  into  the  House  by  Douglas  himself  in  1844)  there  is  no 
hint  of  disturbing  the  Missouri  Compromise. 

2  Pierce  was  hand  in  glove  with  Jefferson  Davis.  Buchanan  was  lending  him- 
self to  the  schemes  for  the  acquisition  of  Cuba.  Marcy  was  more  cautious  but 
not  less  willing.  Cass  was  the  arch-"  Doughface " — the  Northern  man  with 
Southern  principles.  Moreover  Douglas  had  a  handicap  to  overcome  in  that  he 
was  born  in  the  abolitionist  state  of  Vermont  and  was  a  farmer's  son. 


488  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

claims,  and  the  choice  of  the  middle  Nebraska  route  for  the 
projected  Pacific  railway,  instead  of  the  Southern  survey  which 
was  being  pushed  by  Jefferson  Davis  and  other  powerful  friends 
of  the  administration  (see  page  480). 

No  other  man  had  had  so  much  of  a  hand  in  the  organization 
of  our  trans-Mississippi  territory  as  Douglas.  As  chairman  of 
the  House  and  Senate  Committees  on  Territories  he  had  re- 
ported the  bills  by  which  Utah,  New  Mexico,  Washington, 
Oregon,  and  Minnesota  had  been  erected  as  territories  and 
Texas,  Iowa,  Florida,  California,  and  Wisconsin  had  been  ad- 
mitted as  states.  It  was  expansion,  not  slavery,  that  he  was 
interested  in;  and  if  he  incorporated  the  slavery  clauses  in 
his  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill  to  make  it  palatable  to  the  South,1 
it  was  certainly  not  with  the  intention  of  extending  slavery 
and  probably  not  primarily  with  the  intention  of  gaining  the 
presidency,  but  for  the  immediate  object  of  getting  the  new 
territory  organized.  .  His  mistake,  or  rather  his  moral  failing, 

1  Professor  P.  O.  Ray,  in  his  monograph  on  "The  Repeal  of  the  Missouri 
Compromise"  (1909),  pointed  out  the  immense  importance  of  local  politics  in 
the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill.  In  the  election  of  1850  Thomas  H.  Benton  had  been 
driven  by  David  R.  Atchison  (proslavery)  from  the  seat  in  the  Senate  which 
he  had  held  for  thirty  years.  In  his  fight  to  regain  his  seat  Benton  appealed 
to  the  people  of  Missouri  on  the  issue  of  expansion,  urging  them  to  settle  on 
the  Nebraska  lands,  where  the  bona-fide  Indian  allotments  were  scarce.  Atchison 
did  not  favor  expansion,  because  he  regarded  the  Missouri  Compromise  as 
firmly  established,  and  rather  than  have  a  new  free  territory  to  the  west  of 
Missouri  (which  was  already  bounded  on  two  sides  by  free  states),  he  would 
have  no  new  territory  at  all.  But  Benton's  insistence  on  the  popular  issue  of 
expansion  forced  Atchison  to  change  his  position  in  order  to  escape  the  accusa- 
tion of  being  indifferent  to  the  demands  of  the  Missouri  frontiersmen.  Driven 
thus  to  support  a  Nebraska  bill,  Atchison  changed  his  position  on  the  Missouri 
Compromise.  It  must  now  be  repealed.  As  President  pro  tem.  of  the  Senate  he 
used  his  influence  with  Douglas  to  this  end.  Douglas  himself  had  been  absent 
in  Europe  when  the  bitter  battle  between  the  senator  and  the  ex-senator  of 
Missouri  was  being  waged  in  the  summer  of  1853;  and  how  little  he  thought 
of  the  revival  of  the  Question  of  slavery  in  the  territories  on  his  return,  only  a 
month  before  the  opening  of  Congress,  we  may  judge  from  a  letter  which  he 
wrote  to  a  political  friend  in  Illinois  outlining  the  important  matters  to  come 
before  the  session.  These  were  tariff  reform,  Treasury  reform,  river  and  har- 
bor bills,  revision  of  tonnage  duties,  grants  for  railroads,  and  the  Pacific  rail- 
way. Not  a  word  about  slavery  or  Nebraska! 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  489 

was  that  he  did  not  see  that  what  to  him  was  a  minor  and  in- 
cidental element  in  the  bill  was  just  the  crucial  point  of  it  for 
an  increasing  number  of  Northern  men.  "It  is  enough,"  says 
William  G.  Brown,  "to  decide  that  Douglas  took  a  wrong 
course,  and  to  point  out  how  ambition  may  very  well  have  led 
him  into  it.  It  is  too  much  to  say  that  he  knew  it  was  wrong, 
and  took  it  solely  because  he  was  ambitious."1 

James  Ford  Rhodes  says  that  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act  "in 
its  scope  and  consequences  was  the  most  momentous  measure 
that  passed  Congress  from  the  day  that  the  Senators  and  Repre- 
sentatives first  met  to  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil  War"  (Vol.  I, 
p.  490) ;  and  John  W.  Burgess  declares  that  the  act  was  "proba- 
bly the  greatest  error  which  the  Congress  of  the  United  States 
ever  committed,  and  the  arguments  by  which  it  was  supported 
were  among  the  most  specious  fallacies  that  have  ever  misled 
the  minds  of  men"  ("The  Middle  Period,"  p.  405).  Certain  it  is 
that  with  the  passage  of  this  act  the  day  of  compromise  between 
the  sections  was  over.  "The  Fugitive  Slave  Law  did  much  to 
unglue  the  eyes  of  men,"  wrote  Emerson,  "and  now  the  Kansas- 
Nebraska  Bill  leaves  us  staring."  The  importance  of  the  act 
may  be  seen  in  its  immediate  consequences.  It  gave  the  finish- 
ing stroke  to  the  Whig  party  as  a  national  organization.  Every 
Whig  member  of  Congress  from  the  states  north  of  Mason  and 
Dixon's  line  voted  against  the  bill,  and  all  but  seven  of  the 
Whigs  from  the  states  south  of  the  line  voted  for  it.  It  drove 
thousands  of  Northern  Democrats  out  of  the  party.  It  gave  an 
immense  impetus  to  the  Free-Soil  propaganda.  "Pierce  and 
Douglas,"  wrote  Greeley  in  the  New  York  Tribune,  "have  made 
more  Abolitionists  in  three  months  than  Garrison  and  Phillips 
could  have  made  in  half  a  century."  The  Anti-Nebraska  men 
of  all  shades  of  opinion  drew  together  to  resist  the  extension  of 
slavery  into  the  territory  long  dedicated  to  freedom.2  A  year 

1  William  G.  Brown,  "Life  of  Stephen  A.  Douglas,"  p.  88. 

2  The  autumn  elections  of  1854  sent  117  Anti-Nebraska  men  to  the  House  and 
reduced  the  administration  Democrats  from  159  to  79  members.    "Of  the  forty- 
two  Northern  Democrats  who  had  voted  for  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill,  only 
seven  were  re-elected"  (Rhodes,  Vol.  II,  p.  67). 


490  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

after  the  bill  was  passed  the  Democrats  were  confronted  by  a 
rapidly  growing  party  whose  platform  was  the  subordination 
of  every  other  political  issue  to  the  fight  for  the  restriction 
of  slavery.  When  Douglas  reported  his  bill  the  Northwestern 
states  were  solidly  Democratic.  Every  one  of  the  senators 
from  Indiana,  Illinois,  Michigan,  Wisconsin,  and  Iowa,  and  all 
but  five  of  the  twenty-nine  members  from  these  states  in  the 
lower  House,  belonged  to  the  party  of  the  administration.  The 
enormous  influence  of  Douglas  kept  Illinois  in  the  Democratic 
column  for  one  more  presidential  election  ;  but  Michigan,  Wis- 
consin, and  Iowa  went  over  to  the  new  Republican  party 
forthwith,  and  only  Indiana  remained  permanently  in  the 
"  doubtful  column." 

Moreover,  the  political  revolution  caused  by  the  Kansas- 
Nebraska  Act  was  the  result  of  an  apparently  needless  and 
wanton  disturbance  of  the  status  quo  of  slavery  in  the  Louisiana 
Purchase  territory.  The  Democrats  were  securely  established 
in  power  in  every  branch  of  the  government.  Unionist  senti- 
ment was  victorious  in  the  South.1  President  Pierce  was  pledged 
to  the  "  finality"  of  the  Compromise  of  1850.  Douglas  himself 
had  said  on  leaving  the  stormy  session  of  the  Compromise  Con- 
gress that  he  never  expected  to  make  another  speech  on  the  sub- 
ject of  slavery. 

Of  course,  one  may  say  that  two  civilizations  so  hostile  to 
each  other  could  not  long  continue  to  exist  side  by  side,  espe- 
cially when  one  was  coming  to  be  more  and  more  a  moral  re- 
proach in  the  eyes  of  the  other;  that  if  it  had  not  been  the 
Kansas-Nebraska  Bill  it  would  have  been  some  other  bill  re- 
viving the  latent  strife  of  the  sections  and  revealing  the  futility 
of  the  compromise  which  men  called  final.  Such  speculations 
may  comfort  the  philosopher  and  excuse  in  his  eyes  the  human 
agents  of  fate  or  Providence.  But  for  the  historian  a  man  is 


does  not  mean  that  the  South  was  at  all  converted  to  the  doctrine  of 
a  "consolidated"  government.  The  Unionist  victory  of  1851  was  not  a  repudia- 
tion of  states'  rights.  It  signified  only  that  the  time  was  not  yet  ripe  for  a 
Southern  "  nationalist  "  movement.  "  To  secede  from  the  Union  now,"  said  Cheves 
of  South  Carolina,  "would  be  to  secede  also  from  the  South." 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF          491 

judged  by  his  deeds.  Whatever  his  provocation  or  his  pretext, 
his  temptation  or  his  excuse,  the  fact  remains  that  it  was  Stephen 
A.  Douglas  who  undid  the  gates  of  Janus.  And  for  this  chiefly 
he  will  be  remembered  as  long  as  our  history  is  written. 

While  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill  was  still  under  discussion 
in  the  Senate,  a  group  of  WThigs,  Democrats,  and  Free-Soilers 
met  at  Ripon,  Wisconsin  (February  28),  and  resolved  that  if 
the  bill  passed  they  would  organize  a  new  party  on  the  sole 
issue  of  resistance  to  the  extension  of  slavery.  E.  A.  Bovay, 
the  leader  of  the  group,  suggested  in  a  letter  to  Horace  Greeley 
that  the  new  party  should  take  the  name  of  "Republican," 
and  Greeley  popularized  the  name  through  the  columns  of  the 
New  York  Tribune.  On  July  6  several  men  of  all  shades  of 
political  opinion  met  in  a  grove  of  oaks  on  the  outskirts  of 
Jackson,  Michigan,  and  formally  launched  the  new  Republican 
party.  They  adopted  a  platform  declaring  that  slavery  was 
"a  violation  of  the  rights  of  man"  and  of  "the  law  of  nature, 
which  is  the  law  of  liberty."  The  history  of  the  formation  of 
our  government,  and  the  testimony  of  men  like  Washington 
and  Jefferson,  showed  that  it  was  "the  purpose  of  our  fathers 
not  to  promote  but  to  prevent  the  spread  of  slavery,"  that  the 
Constitution  gave  Congress  "full  and  complete  power  for  the 
municipal  government  of  the  Territories,"  that  the  repeal  of 
the  Missouri  Compromise  was  an  act  "unprecedented  in  the 
history  of  our  country"  and  "a  wanton  and  dangerous  frustra- 
tion of  the  purposes  and  hopes"  of  the  founders  of  this  nation. 
They  demanded  the  repeal  of  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act,  the 
repeal  of  the  Fugitive-Slave  Law  of  1850,  and  the  abolition  of 
slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia.  They  recommended  the 
calling  of  a  general  convention  of  the  free  states  (and  of  such 
slave  states  as  might  wish  to  attend)  to  adopt  nation-wide 
measures  for  combating  the  spread  of  slavery.  They  agreed 
to  sink  their  political  differences  in  the  common  fight  for  free- 
dom and  "to  cooperate  and  be  known  as  Republicans  until  the 
contest  be  terminated."  They  nominated  a  full  state  ticket  and 
elected  it  the  following  November,  together  with  three  of  the 
four  Michigan  congressmen  and  a  decided  majority  in  both 


492  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

houses  of  the  state  legislature.  The  summer  and  early  autumn 
of  1854  saw  conventions  in  various  other  states  (Maine,  Ver- 
mont, Massachusetts,  Ohio,  New  York)  to  organize  political 
opposition  to  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act.  James  G.  Elaine  said 
many  years  later  that  seven  states  claimed  the  honor  of  being 
the  birthplace  of  the  Republican  party,  as  seven  cities  contended 
for  the  honor  of  Homer's  birth.  This  very  rivalry  is  a  proof 
of  the  spontaneity  and  universality  of  the  protest  against  the 
repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise. 

The  political  upheaval  caused  by  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act 
resulted  in  one  of  the  strangest  temporary  movements  in  our 
history.  We  have  already  noticed  the  rise  of  the  Native- 
American,  or  "Know-Nothing,"  agitation  in  connection  with 
the  increasing  immigration  of  the  forties  (see  page  470).  The 
disruption  of  the  Whig  party  and  the  disgust  of  many  Northern 
Democrats  with  the  program  of  Douglas  sent  into  the  ranks  of 
the  " Know-Nothings"  thousands  of  voters  who  had  yet  no 
organized  Republican  party  to  which  totally.  They  elected 
governors  or  legislatures  in  several  states  (frew  England,  Mary- 
land, Kentucky,  California)  and  sent  a  respectable  delegation  to 
Congress.  But  a  party  founded  on  principles  so  un-American 
as  those  of  the  "American"  party — secrecy,  religious  intoler- 
ance, and  opposition  to  immigration — could  never  outlast  a 
period  of  momentary  and  panicky  confusion  in  our  country. 
Furthermore,  in  the  attempt  to  hold  the  "South  Americans" 
and  the  "North  Americans"  together  it  split  in  its  first  and 
only  presidential  convention,  of  1856.  It  served  merely  as  a 
kind  of  halfway  house  to  detach  Whigs  and  Democrats  from 
their  old  allegiance.  Like  the  frog  in  La  Fontaine's  fable,  it 
burst  in  the  effort  to  blow  itself  up  to  the  size  of  a  presidential  ox. 

Meanwhile  events  in  the  new  territory  of  Kansas  were  fur- 
nishing a  dismal  commentary  on  Douglas's  doctrine  of  popular 
sovereignty.  Immediately  after  the  passage  of  the  act  a  battle 
for  the  control  of  the  territory  began.  "Come  on,  then,  gentle- 
men of  the  Slave  States!"  cried  Seward;  "since  there  is  no 
escaping  your  challenge,  I  accept  it  in  behalf  of  freedom.  We 
will  engage  in  a  competition  for  the  virgin  soil  of  Kansas,  and 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  493 

God  give  the  victory  to  the  side  that  is  stronger  in  numbers 
as  it  is  in  the  right ! "  Eli  Thayer  and  Amos  Lawrence  of  Mas- 
sachusetts organized  the  first  Emigrant  Aid  Society  to  colonize 
the  new  territory.  The  first  company  of  settlers,  twenty-four 
in  number,  started  from  Massachusetts  in  the  middle  of  July 
and  finally  pitched  their  tents  on  the  banks  of  the  Kansas  River, 
where  the  free  town  of  Lawrence  sprang  up.  The  New  E',ng- 
landers  had  to  journey  more  than  a  thousand  miles  to  reach 
the  territory,  but  the  proslavery  men  of  Missouri  had  only  to 
cross  the  border.  This  they  did  by  the  hundreds,  forming 
societies  of  "Blue  Lodges"  or  "Sons  of  the  South/'  whose  pur- 
pose was  to  defeat  the  schemes  of  the  immigrants  to  "aboli- 
tionize  Kansas."  They  founded  the  town  of  Atchison  on  the 
left  bank  of  the  Missouri  River  and  announced  in  their  im- 
provised paper,  The  Squatter  Sovereign,  that  they  were  ready 
"to  lynch  and  hang,  tar  and  feather  and  drown  every  white- 
livered  Abolitionist  who  dared  to  pollute  the  soil  of  Kansas." 
When  the  first  governor,  Andrew  H.  Reeder  of  Pennsylvania, 
arrived  in  the  territory  in  October,  he  found  the  stage  set  for 
a  violent  contest  of  vituperation,  fraud,  and  murder  which  was 
to  last  for  more  than  two  years.  Governor  Reeder  set  Novem- 
ber 29,  1854,  as  the  day  for  the  election  of  a  territorial  delegate 
to  Congress.  On  the  day  before  the  election,  Missourians  began 
to  pour  into  Kansas  "with  every  kind  of  vehicle  that  could 
run  on  wheels  and  every  horse  or  mule  that  could  stand  on 
legs."  The  "invaders"  cast  over  1700  votes  for  the  proslavery 
candidate  Whitfield,  insuring  his  election  by  an  overwhelming 
majority,  and  returned  to  their  homes. 

It  was  thus  that  "popular  sovereignty"  was  inaugurated  in 
Kansas.  The  government  which  was  begun  in  fraud  was  con- 
tinued in  lawlessness  and  terror.  Early  in  1855  Reeder  took 
a  census  of  the  territory,  preparatory  to  the  establishment  of  a 
legislature.  The  count  showed  a  population  of  about  8500, 
of  whom  2900  were  males  of  voting  age.  Yet  on  election  day 
(March  30)  6320  votes  were  cast  (of  which  more  than  five 
sixths  were  illegal),  and  a  proslavery  legislature  was  elected. 
Summoned  by  the  governor  to  meet  at  Pawnee,  they  defied  his 


494  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

authority,  unseated  the  few  Free  Soil  members  who  had  been 
chosen,  and  moved  to  Shawnee  Mission  on  the  Missouri  border, 
where  they  proceeded  to  enact  laws  (over  the  governor's  veto) 
wholly  favorable  to  slavery.  Governor  Reeder,  whose  only  of- 
fense was  his  sincere  effort  to  secure  an  honest  election  in  Kan- 
sas, was  removed  by  President  Pierce  in  the  midsummer  of 
1855  and  went  over  to  the  antislavery  party,  by  whom  he  was 
immediately  chosen  territorial  delegate. 

The  Free  Soil  men,  unable  to  cope  with  the  Missouri  immi- 
grants, proceeded  with  their  own  program.  Adopting  the  "Cali- 
fornia plan,"  they  held  a  convention  at  Topeka  in  October, 

1855,  and  framed  a  free-state  constitution,  which  they  sub- 
mitted to  the  people  for  ratification  in  December.   The  pro- 
slavery  men,  of  course,  ignored  the  Topeka  Constitution.    It 
was  adopted  by  a  strictly  Free  Soil  vote.    Under  it  state  officers 
were  chosen  and  a  legislature  was  elected  to  meet  at  Topeka  on 
November  4,  1856.    Thus  Kansas  had  two  governments — the 
" legal"  one  at  Shawnee  Mission,  organized  by  fraud,  and  the 
" illegal"  one  at  Topeka,  representing  the  will  of  the  majority 
of  bona-fide  inhabitants.    President  Pierce  was  distressed  by 
the  situation.    The  strife  in  Kansas,  he  told  Reeder  when  the 
latter  visited  Washington  in  the  spring  of  1855,  haunted  him 
day  and  night.    In  his  message  to  Congress  in  December  he 
tried  to  dodge  responsibility  for  the  situation  by  declaring  that 
nothing  had  happened  in  Kansas  "to  justify  Federal  inter- 
ference"; but  the  next  month  he  sent  in  a  special  message  in 
which  he  took  sides  squarely  with  the  proslavery  party.    He 
laid  all  the  blame  for  the  strife  on  the  Emigrant  Aid  Societies, 
denounced  the  Topeka  Constitution  and  the  elections  held  un- 
der it  as  "illegal,"  and  recognized  the  fraudulent  legislature  at 
Shawnee  Mission  as  "the  legitimate  legislative  assembly  of  the 
Territory." 

When  the  free-state  legislature  met  at  Topeka  in  March, 

1856,  under  the  moderating  influence  of  "Governor"  Charles 
Robinson,  it  refrained  from  any  acts  of  violence  against  either 
Pierce's  new  governor,  Wilson  Shannon  of  Ohio,  or  the  ter- 
ritorial legislature  which  Pierce  had  recognized.     It  elected 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  495 

Reeder  and  Lane  as  United  States  senators  and  appointed  a 
commission  to  draw  up  a  petition  asking  for  the  admission  of 
Kansas  to  the  Union  as  a  free  state.  Nevertheless  Judge 
Lecompton,  of  the  first  Federal  District  Court  of  the  territory, 
virtually  charged  the  jury  to  find  indictments  against  Robinson, 
Reeder,  Lane,  and  other  prominent  free-state  leaders  for  "con- 
structive treason."  Every  month  saw  the  confusion  increasing 
and  civil  war  more  imminent  in  Kansas.  A  committee  of  the 
House  sent  to  the  territory  in  April,  1856,'  to  investigate  the 
conflicting  claims  of  Whitfield  and  Reeder  to  the  delegate's 
seat,  reported  that  there  was  no  prospect  of  a  fair  election  in 
Kansas  without  the  presence  of  United  States  troops  at  every 
polling-place.  Free  Soil  immigrants  were  pouring  into  the  ter- 
ritory by  the  thousands.  The  Missourians,  unable  to  hold  the 
proslavery  fort  alone,  appealed  to  the  South  for  aid  in  the 
autumn  of  1855,  and  in  response  detachments  of  several  hun- 
dred men  marched  from  Alabama,  South  Carolina,  and  Georgia 
into  Kansas.  Major  Buford's  Alabamians  were  armed  by  Gov- 
ernor Shannon  and  used  as  a  Kansas  militia.  The  free-state 
men  fortified  their  capital  of  Lawrence.  Under  these  circum- 
stances the  deed  of  violence  which  should  lead  to  civil  war  was 
almost  inevitable.  It  came  with  the  cowardly  attempt  of  some 
free-state  man  to  assassinate  the  proslavery  Sheriff  Jones,  as  he 
rode  into  Lawrence  to  arrest  a  man  for  murder.  In  revenge  the 
sheriff  got  control  of  the  marshal's  posse  and  excited  a  lawless 
raid  "to  wipe  out  Lawrence."  Armed  men  entered  the  town 
on  May  21,  1856,  under  banners  bearing  the  mottoes  and  de- 
vices of  various  Southern  clans,  and  proceeded  to  wreck  the 
Free-State  Hotel  and  the  "abolitionist"  printing-press  and  to 
pillage  and  burn  private  dwellings. 

While  the  ashes  of  Lawrence  were  still  hot  an  outrageous 
deed  was  perpetrated  in  the  United  States  Senate.  Sumner 
of  Massachusetts  had  delivered  a  speech  on  May  19-20  called 
"The  Crime  against  Kansas."  It  was  a  fierce  attack  on  the 
proslavery  leaders  in  the  territory  and  their  abetters  in  the 
South.  Sumner  singled  out  for  the  special  victim  of  his  venom- 
ous invective  Senator  A.  P.  Butler  of  South  Carolina,  who 


496  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

was  not  present  to  reply.  Late  in  the  afternoon  of  the  twenty- 
second,  when  Sumner  was  working  at  his  desk  in  the  deserted 
Senate  chamber,  Preston  S.  Brooks,  a  congressman  from  South 
Carolina  and  a  relative  of  Butler's,  walked  up  to  the  senator 
and,  with  a  few  words  of  justifiable  reproach,  struck  him 
on  the  head  with  a  heavy  gutta-percha  cane.  Sumner,  dazed, 
struggled  to  rise,  wrenching  the  desk  from  its  fastenings  in  his 
effort.  But  Brooks  rained  blow  after  blow  upon  him  until  he 
sank  bleeding  and  insensible  to  the  floor.  Toombs,  standing 
in  the  lobby,  saw  Sumner  fall,  and  Douglas  and  Slidell,  con- 
versing in  an  anteroom,  were  told  by  a  Senate  page  what  was 
going  on.  But  none  of  these  men  interfered  to  stay  Brooks's 
murderous  fury.  A  motion  to  expel  Brooks  from  the  House 
failed  to  get  the  necessary  two-thirds  vote.  He  resigned  and 
was  immediately  reflected  by  his  district  with  emphatic  testi- 
monials of  approval  and  with  only  six  dissenting  votes.  Sumner 
was  gradually  restored  to  a  moderate  degree  of  health  by  the 
skill  of  European  specialists,  but  it  was  not  until  December, 
1859,  that  he  was  able  to  resume  the  seat  in  the  Senate  which 
the  legislature  of  Massachusetts  had  kept  vacant  for  him. 

Still  another  deed  of  horror  was  crowded  into  the  fateful 
week  which  saw  the  sack  of  Lawrence  and  the  attack  on  Sumner. 
John  Brown,  a  fanatical  immigrant  farmer  from  New  England, 
brooding  over  the  murder  of  free-state  men  in  Kansas,  pro- 
ceeded on  the  night  of  May  24,  with  his  four  sons  and  three 
other  associates,  to  the  settlement  of  Dutch  Henry's  on  Potta- 
watomie  Creek,  and,  dragging  five  proslavery  men  from  their 
cabins,  hacked  them  to  pieces.  This  unspeakable  deed  let  loose 
civil  war  in  Kansas.  Bands  of  armed  men  marched  up  and 
down  in  the  land,  like  the  factional  "armies"  of  a  Central  Amer- 
ican republic.  Farmers  went  in  groups,  armed  to  the  teeth, 
to  till  their  fields.  No  herd  was  safe  from  plunder  and  no  house 
nor  barn  from  the  torch.  Governor  Shannon  tried  hard  to 
restore  order.  He  sent  Colonel  Sumner  with  United  States 
dragoons  to  disperse  the  marauding  bands,  but  the  guerrilla 
warfare  continued  almost  unabated.  The  passions  roused  at 
Lawrence  and  Dutch  Henry's  had  to  burn  themselves  out. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  497 

Eight  days  after  the  murders  on  the  Pottawatomie  the  Demo- 
cratic nominating  convention  met  at  Cincinnati.  In  the  face 
of  what  was  happening  in  Kansas  it  had  the  hardihood  to  de- 
clare in  its  platform  that  the  principle  of  popular  sovereignty 
"embodied  the  only  sound  and  safe  solution  of  the  slavery  ques- 
tion." Nevertheless,  the  delegates  wisely  refrained  from  nomi- 
nating a  man  who  could  in  any  way  be  held  responsible  for  the 
Kansas  situation.  Their  prime  task  was  to  hold  the  Northern 
Democracy  together.  Therefore  they  passed  over  Pierce  and 
Douglas  and  on  the  seventeenth  ballot  named  James  Buchanan, 
a  mediocre  man,  whose  eminent  "availability"  consisted  in  the 
facts  that  he  was  acceptable  to  the  North,  that  he  had  been 
absent  as  minister  to  Great  Britain  when  the  Kansas  struggle 
was  precipitated,  and  that  he  was  expected  to  carry  his  own 
pivotal  state  of  Pennsylvania.  John  C.  Breckinridge  of  Ken- 
tucky was  nominated  for  vice  president. 

The  convention  of  the  new  Republican  party  met  at  Phila- 
delphia on  June  17.  Seward  might  have  had  the  nomination, 
but  he  declined  to  let  his  name  be  presented,  probably  because 
he  thought  that  defeat  at  the  polls  would  injure  his  political 
career.  He  underestimated  the  chances  of  Republican  success 
in  1856,  and  he  knew  that  his  pronounced  hostility  to  the  Amer- 
ican party,  his  abolitionist  views,1  and  his  extreme  Whiggery  in 
New  York  politics  would  weaken  his  candidacy.  Justice  John 
McLean  of  Ohio,  who  had  served  on  the  Supreme  Court  since 
his  appointment  by  Jackson  twenty-six  years  before,  was  the 
choice  of  the  more  conservative  delegates.  But  the  candidacy 
of  John  C.  Fremont  of  California  had  been  carefully  worked 
up  for  months  before  the  convention.  Fremont  was  a  man  of 
small  judgment  and  almost  no  political  experience,  but  his  ro- 
mantic career  as  the  "pathfinder"  of  the  Far  West,  his  "con- 
quest" of  California,  his  youth  and  energy,  all  recommended 
him  as  a  fit  leader  for  a  young  and  aggressive  party.  "The 
Fremont  boom  in  the  West,"  said  Samuel  Bowles,  "went  like 


1  Seward  had  publicly  advocated  the  repeal  of  the  Fugitive-Slave  Law  of 
1850  and  the  abolition  of  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia. 


4Q8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  prairie  fire."  The  first  formal  ballot  resulted  in  520  votes  for 
Fremont,  37  for  McLean,  and  one  for  Seward.  William  M. 
Dayton  of  New  Jersey  was  nominated  as  Fremont's  running- 
mate,  although  Abraham  Lincoln,  a  supporter  of  Judge  McLean, 
received  no  votes  for  second  place  on  the  ticket  on  an  informal 
ballot.  The  "  Know-Nothings  "  nominated  ex-President  Fillmore. 
The  Republicans  appealed  to  the  country  on  a  platform  which 
embodied  the  principles  of  the  Wilmot  Proviso  and  the  Free- 
Soilers  of  1848.  It  was  the  "right  and  duty  of  Congress"  to 
exercise  its  power  of  control  over  the  territories  of  the  United 
States  by  abolishing  in  them  the  "twin  relics  of  barbarism," 
slavery  and  polygamy.  The  platform  reviewed  and  condemned 
the  shocking  violations  of  law  and  order  in  Kansas,  all  "done 
with  the  knowledge,  sanction,  and  procurement  of  the  pres- 
ent administration."  It  demanded  the  immediate  admission  of 
Kansas  to  the  Union  under  its  free-state  constitution.  The 
Democrats  knew  that  every  day's  prolongation  of  anarchy  in 
Kansas  injured  their  prospects  for  the  autumn  election.  Senator 
Toombs  of  Georgia  introduced  a  bill  to  secure  "a  fair  and 
honest  expression  of  the  opinion  of  the  present  inhabitants  of 
Kansas."  Under  the  supervision  of  a  commission  of  five  men 
appointed  by  the  President  a  careful  census  of  the  territory 
was  to  be  taken ;  delegates  to  a  convention  were  to  be  chosen, 
and  they  were  to  frame  a  constitution  if  the  convention  should 
vote  it  expedient  for  Kansas  to  seek  admission  to  the  Union  at 
that  time.  The  bill  passed  the  Senate  (33  to  12)  on  July  3  ;  a 
few  hours  later  the  Republican  House  passed  a  bill,  by  the  nar- 
row margin  of  99  votes  to  97,  for  the  admission  of  Kansas  under 
the  Topeka  Constitution.  Neither  House  would  consider  the 
other's  proposal.  The  Senate  bill  was  fair  enough,  but  the 
Republicans  maintained  that  the  people  of  Kansas  had  already 
decided  to  become  a  free  state.  Moreover,  they  would  not  in- 
trust the  appointment  of  a  commission  to  Pierce,  whom  they  had 
condemned  in  their  platform  as  the  man  responsible  for  the  an- 
archy and  violence  in  the  territory.  Douglas  charged  them  with 
planning  to  keep  the  Kansas  question  unsettled  in  order  to  gain 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  499 

votes.  "An  angel  from  heaven,"  he  said,  "could  not  write  a  bill 
to  restore  peace  in  Kansas  that  would  be  acceptable  to  the  Aboli- 
tionist Republican  party  previous  to  the  presidential  election." 

Congress  having  adjourned  in  August  without  bringing  any 
relief  in  the  Kansas  situation,  the  President  took  the  matter 
into  his  own  hands.  A  new  governor  (the  third  in  as  many 
years)  was  sent  out  in  the  person  of  the  able  John  W.  Geary 
of  Pennsylvania.  The  free-state  leaders  who  had  been  im- 
prisoned at  the  virtual  behest  of  Judge  Lecompton  were  re- 
leased, and  the  unrighteous  judge  was  eventually  removed  from 
the  bench.  All  bodies  of  armed  men  except  those  authorized 
by  the  government  were  ordered  to  disperse.  Federal  troops 
were  stationed  at  the  danger  points.  At  the  end  of  September 
Geary  wrote  to  Secretary  Marcy :  "Peace  now  reigns  in  Kansas. 
Confidence  is  gradually  being  restored.  Settlers  are  returning 
to  their  claims.  Citizens  are  resuming  their  ordinary  pursuits, 
and  a  general  gladness  pervades  the  community."  If  the  report 
was  somewhat  too  roseate,  there  was  enough  truth  in  it  to  give 
heart  to  the  Democrats  in  the  approaching  election.  It  should 
be  noted  in  passing  that  Geary's  work  was  accomplished  "upon 
the  point  of  the  sword  of  the  Union."  It  testified  to  the  utter 
breakdown  of  the  experiment  of  popular  sovereignty  in  Kansas, 
the  repudiation  by  the  administration  itself  of  the  doctrine  of 
"national  irresponsibility." 

Adopting  the  old  slogan  of  the  Free  Soil  party  of  1848,  "Free 
soil,  free  speech,  free  labor,  and  free  men,"  and  adding  "Fre- 
mont and  victory"  with  a  shout,  the  Republicans  went  into 
the  campaign  with  the  fervor  of  crusaders.  But  their  zeal  out- 
ran their  prospects,  even  as  their  cause  was  stronger  than  their 
candidate.  It  was  inevitable  that  the  Republican  ticket  should 
be  a  Northern  one,  and  this  wholly  sectional  ticket  furnished 
the  Democrats  with  their  best  campaign  material.1  From  public 
men  and  the  press  all  through  the  South  came  the  awful  warn- 

aln  the  election  of  1828  both  the  tickets  had  been  "sectional" — Adams  and 
Rush  (Republican)  from  the  North,  and  Jackson  and  Calhoun  (Democratic) 
from  the  South.  But  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  was  not  yet  a  significant  separator. 


500  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ing  that  the  triumph  of  the  "Black  Republicans"  would  mean 
the  immediate  dissolution  of  the  Union.  Fillmore  asked  the 
Republicans  how  they  could  have  "the  madness  or  folly  to 
believe  that  our  Southern  brethren  would  submit  to  be  governed 
by  Fremont."  Conservatives  in  the  North  and  South  alike 
turned  to  Buchanan.  Toombs,  the  old  Whig  leader  in  Georgia, 
who  had  proposed  the  conciliatory  Kansas  bill  in  the  Senate, 
said  that  the  object  of  Fremont's  friends  was  to  conquer  the 
South.  Rufus  Choate,  the  prominent  Whig  statesman  of  Massa- 
chusetts, "turned  his  eyes  from  the  consequences"  which  would 
ensue  if  Fremont  should  be  elected.  "To  the  fifteen  states  of 
the  South,"  he  said,  "Fremont's  government  would  appear  an 
alien  government" — worse  than  that,  "a  hostile  government." 
Again,  as  in  1850  and  1852,  the  business  interests  and  the  more 
conservative  men  of  the  North,  with  whom  the  preservation  of 
industrial  peace  and  the  political  status  quo  counted  for  more 
than  the  support  of  a  moral  principle  at  the  risk  of  certain 
agitation  and  possible  dissolution  of  the  Union,  carried  the  day 
for  the  Democrats.  Buchanan  was  sure  of  the  votes  south  of 
Mason  and  Dixon's  line  (with  the  possible  exception  of  Maryland 
and  Kentucky,  which  were  strong  for  Fillmore),  and  he  needed 
only  Pennsylvania  and  one  other  Northern  state  to  win.  The 
contest  in  Pennsylvania  was  hectic.  The  Democrats,  North 
and  South,  poured  large  sums  of  money  into  the  state,  and  the 
Republicans  sent  more  than  a  thousand  campaign  speakers  into 
the  cities  and  towns  from  the  Delaware  to  the  Alleghenies. 
Buchanan  carried  the  state  by  a  margin  of  only  1025  votes  in  a 
total  of  460,404.  Indiana,  Illinois,  New  Jersey,  and  California 
also  went  Democratic.  In  spite  of  the  fact  that  Buchanan 
received  174  electoral  votes  to  114  for  Fremont,  the  Republicans 
were  far  from  discouraged.  As  a  new  party  in  their  first  presi- 
dential election,  they  had  polled  1,314,264  votes  against  1,838- 
169  for  Buchanan,  who  had  the  backing  of  the  old  established 
Democratic  party,  in  possession  of  all  the  patronage  of  the 
government.  They  believed  that  on  the  inevitable  disintegration 
of  the  American  party,  which  had  been  a  temporary  refuge  for 
the  undecided,  the  majority  of  Fillmore's  874,534  votes  would 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  501 

be  theirs.    They  closed  their  ranks  after  the  defeat  and  pre- 
pared anew  for  the  battle,  cheered  by  Whittier's  marching-song: 

If  months  have  well-nigh  won  the  field, 
What  may  not  four  years  do ! 

Buchanan  was  inaugurated  on  the  fourth  of  March,  1857. 
Two  days  later  the  Supreme  Court  handed  down  the  most 
famous  decision  in  its  history.  The  facts  in  the  case  were  as 
follows.  In  1834  an  army  surgeon  stationed  at  St.  Louis  had 
moved,  pursuant  to  the  orders  of  the  government,  first  to  Rock 
Island,  Illinois,  then  across  the  Mississippi  to  Fort  Snelling,  in 
the  Louisiana  Purchase  territory.  He  took  with  him  his  negro 
slave,  Dred  Scott.  Some  years  after  the  return  to  Missouri 
Dred  Scott  sued  for  his  freedom  on  the  ground  that  residence 
in  a  free  state  and  on  territory  made  free  by  the  Missouri  Com- 
promise had  released  him  from  bondage.  His  suit  was  granted 
by  a  lower  state  court  at  St.  Louis,  but  the  decision  was  reversed 
by  the  supreme  court  of  Missouri  ( 1852 ) .  Meantime  Scott  had 
been  transferred  to  a  new  master,  John  Sandford  of  New  York, 
and  proceeded  to  bring  suit  for  his  freedom  in  the  federal  circuit 
court  of  Missouri,  as  a  citizen  of  one  state  against  a  citizen 
of  another  state.  The  court  heard  the  case,  thereby  virtually 
conceding  that  Scott  was  a  citizen  of  Missouri,  but  the  decision 
of  the  jury  was  adverse  to  the  negro.  He  was  remanded  to  the 
status  of  a  slave.  Then  the  case  was  taken  to  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States,  on  a  writ  of  error,  and  argued  in 
the  spring  and  the  winter  terms  of  I856.1 

The  Supreme  Court  had  only  one  question  to  decide :  Did 
the  circuit  court  in  Missouri  err  in  its  decision  remanding  Dred 
Scott  to  slavery?  And  in  its  argument  it  was  bound  legally 
to  review  only  testimony  on  record  in  the  circuit  court.  But 
the  majority  of  the  Supreme  Court  justices  were  Southerners, 
and  at  the  instigation  of  Justice  Wayne  of  Georgia  they  pro- 
ceeded to  render  a  decision  covering  the  whole  question  of 

1Of  course  the  negro  slave  was  not  the  author  of  all  this  litigation.  A 
Mr.  Roswell  Field,  a  stanch  antislavery  lawyer  from  Vermont,  gave  his  services 
gratis  and  secured  the  cooperation  of  Montgomery  Blair  in  the  federal  courts. 


502  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

negro  citizenship  and  the  status  of  slaves  in  the  territories. 
They  thought  to  put  a  quietus  on  the  slavery  controversy  by 
the  judgment  of  the  highest  tribunal  in  the  land.  Consequently 
Chief  Justice  Taney  read  a  long  and  labored  decision,  as  the 
majority  opinion  of  the  court,  declaring  that  the  negro  was 
not  a  citizen  in  the  view  of  the  framers  of  the  Constitution  and 
that  Congress  had  no  power  to  make  him  such ;  that  the  circuit 
court  of  Missouri,  therefore,  had  no  jurisdiction  in  the  case ; 
that  the  laws  of  Missouri,  not  Illinois,  decided  Scott's  condition 
so  far  as  residence  in  states  was  concerned,  and  that,  slaves 
being  property,  the  Constitution  protected  their  owners  in  all 
the  territories  of  the  Union.  The  Missouri  Compromise,  there- 
fore, was  unconstitutional.  The  regulation  of  slavery  was  be- 
yond the  power  of  the  national  government.  Only  when  a 
territory  became  a  state  could  it  decide  for  or  against  the 
institution. 

All  of  this  famous  opinion  that  went  beyond  the  simple  order 
to  the  circuit  court  in  Missouri  to  dismiss  the  case  for  lack  of 
jurisdiction — all  the  disquisition  on  the  historical  status  of  the 
negro  and  on  the  power  of  Congress  over  slavery  in  the  terri- 
tories— was  beside  the  point,  an  obiter  dictum,  or  volunteered 
commentary.  It  was  a  glaring  example  of  the  most  debasing 
action  that  the  judiciary  can  commit;  namely,  of  lending  its 
high  and  impartial  authority  to  a  political  cause.  And  it  added 
enormously  to  the  indignation  which  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act 
had  aroused  in  the  North.  The  strong  dissenting  opinions  of 
Justices  Curtis  and  McLean  were  accepted  as  the  sound  law  in 
the  case  throughout  the  free  states. 

Each  of  the  three  departments  of  our  government  had  now 
committed  itself  to  the  support  of  slavery  and  sanctioned  the 
annulment  of  the  Missouri  Compromise.  President  Pierce  had 
been  subservient  to  the  slave  interests  since  the  beginning  of 
his  administration.  He  had  given  his  consent  to  the  Douglas 
legislation  and  supported  the  fraudulent  proslavery  legislature 
of  Kansas.  In  his  last  annual  message,  as  in  his  first,  he  had 
rebuked  the  free-soil  agitators  and  charged  the  North  with 
"  revolutionary  assaults  on  the  South 's  domestic  institution." 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  503 

Congress  had  opened  the  vast  Louisiana  Purchase  territory 
north  of  36°  30'  to  slavery.  And,  finally,  the  Supreme  Court 
had  set  the  seal  of  the  most  august  authority  in  the  land  on 
this  policy  of  the  nationalization  of  slavery,  making  the  insti- 
tution legal  in  every  part  of  the  country  where  it  was  not 
positively  excluded  by  the  municipal  law  of  the  states.  The 
fathers  had  spared  slavery,  in  the  belief  that  it  was  an  evil 
doomed  to  eventual  extinction.  The  compromisers  had  suffered 
it  below  the  36°  30'  line,  or  conceded  its  theoretic  right  to  go 
into  the  arid  lands  of  New  Mexico,  in  the  conviction  that  the 
dedication  of  the  major  part  of  the  territory  of  the  United 
States  to  freedom  would  inevitably  bring  into  the  Union  a  suc- 
cession of  free  states,  leaving  slavery  to  stagnate  in  a  narrowing 
sectional  area.  But  in  the  middle  years  of  the  decade  1850- 
1860  the  slave  power  broke  down  the  barriers  of  a  generation 
and  got  the  sanction  of  president,  Congress,  and  Supreme  Court 
for  its  claims  to  legal  status  in  all  our  territory  from  the  Gulf 
of  Mexico  to  the  Canadian  border.  The  Southern  leaders 
declared  that  henceforth  slavery  should  be  national  and  freedom 
sectional.  The  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  was  their 
defiant  proclamation  against  any  further  humiliation  by  ter- 
ritorial restrictions  or  moral  aspersions.  It  was  a  challenge  to 
the  free  North,  and  it  made  the  Civil  War  inevitable. 

SECESSION 

Like  his  predecessor,  Buchanan  began  his  term  of  office  with 
the  optimistic  prediction  that  the  end  of  the  slavery  agitation 
was  in  sight  and  that  the  country  would  soon  happily  return  to 
questions  of  greater  interest  and  importance.  But  like  his  prede- 
cessor he  also  made  it  evident  from  the  start  that  the  way  of 
return  was  to  be  the  path  designated  by  the  leaders  of  the  South. 
No  slightest  sympathy  or  indulgence  was  shown  for  the .  anti- 
slavery  position.  The  cabinet,  though  far  inferior  to  Pierce's, 
was  as  decidedly  Southern  in  cast.  The  senile  indolence  of  Lewis 
Cass  took  the  place  of  Marcy's  alert  and  efficient  conduct  of  the 
Department  of  State.  Howell  Cobb  of  Georgia,  who  was  con- 


504  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

sidered  the  master  spirit  in  the  cabinet,  brought  only  disorder 
and  deficit  into  the  Treasury  Department,  which  had  been 
managed  with  surpassing  skill  by  Guthrie  of  Kentucky.  James 
Floyd  of  Virginia,  in  the  War  Department,  was  a  sorry  substi- 
tute for  Jefferson  Davis,  who  resumed  his  seat  in  the  Senate 
to  become  the  most  able  and  eloquent  advocate  of  the  demands 
of  the  South.  Neither  Douglas  nor  any  of  his  prominent  sup- 
porters had  a  place  in  the  cabinet,  and  in  the  distribution  of 
the  patronage  the  Northern  Democracy  was  conspicuously 
neglected. 

The  first  important  crisis  of  the  administration  showed 
Buchanan  to  be  a  man  of  neither  courage  nor  consistency. 
Strife  in  Kansas,  as  we  have  seen,  had  been  allayed  by  the 
liberal  employment  of  the  federal  authority  (p.  499).  But 
Governor  Geary,  like  the  men  who  had  preceded  him,  found  that 
a  policy  of  conciliation  in  Kansas  was  met  with  suspicion  by 
the  free-state  men,  who  mistrusted  any  agent  of  the  administra- 
tion which  had  supported  the  Shawnee  legislature,  and  that  an 
impartial  policy  was  met  with  hostility  by  the  proslavery  men, 
who,  as  they  dwindled  from  month  to  month  in  the  face  of  the 
increasing  migration  from  the  free  states,  relied  more  and  more 
on  force  to  carry  out  their  program.  They  played  their  last 
desperate  card  in  the  autumn  of  1857.  A  convention  called  by 
the  Shawnee  legislature  met  at  Lecompton  to  frame  a  consti- 
tution for  Kansas.  Since  the  convention  had  been  called  over 
the  governor's  veto  and  the  elections  to  it  were  not  based  on 
a  fair  census,  the  free-state  men  refused  to  participate.  The 
result  was  the  choice  of  a  unanimous  proslavery  convention  by 
less  than  one  eighth  of  the  voters  of  the  territory.  In  October, 
however,  the  free-state  men  (persuaded  by  Buchanan's  new 
governor,  Robert  J.  Walker  of  Mississippi,  that  the  adminis- 
tration would  deal  fairly  with  Kansas)  came  to  the  polls  and 
elected  a  majority  of  the  new  territorial  legislature.  The  con- 
vention had  adjourned  to  await  the  result  of  this  election.  Cer- 
tain now  that  they  could  not  get  a  proslavery  constitution 
adopted  by  a  fair  vote  in  the  territory,  the  members  of  the 
Lecompton  convention  resorted  to  a  shabby  trick.  They  com- 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  505 

posed  a  constitution  containing  an  article  which  declared  the 
right  to  slave  property  and  its  increase  inviolable  and  denied 
the  prospective  state  the  power  to  emancipate  slaves  without  the 
consent  of  their  owners  or  to  prevent  their  entrance  into  the 
state.1  It  was  this  clause  alone  that  was  submitted  to  the  people 
of  the  territory  in  December.  A  vote  for  the  constitution  "with 
slavery"  would  mean  adopting  the  above-mentioned  article; 
a  vote  for  the  constitution  "without  slavery"  would  mean  re- 
jecting it  and  prohibiting  the  entrance  of  slaves  into  the  state. 
But  a  vote  either  way  would  mean  the  protection  of  the  slave 
property  already  in  Kansas,  which  was  guaranteed  in  the  body 
of  the  constitution.  The  chance  to  accept  or  reject  the  consti- 
tution as  a  whole — the  only  fair  application  of  Douglas's  doc- 
trine of  "popular  sovereignty" — was  not  given  to  the  people. 
Under  these  circumstances  the  free-state  men  naturally  refused 
to  vote  in  December,  and  the  constitution  "with  slavery"  was 
adopted  by  6226  votes  (nearly  half  of  which  were  fraudulent) 
to  629.  The  next  month  (January  4,  1858)  the  new  anti- 
slavery  legislature  submitted  the  Lecompton  Constitution  as  a 
whole  to  the  voters  of  Kansas,  who  rejected  it  by  the  over- 
whelming majority  of  10,226  to  162.  It  was  clear  enough  that 
a  majority  of  the  people  of  the  territory  wanted  neither  more 
slaves  in  Kansas  nor  those  that  were  already  there. 

Now  Buchanan  had  given  ample  assurance  of  his  intention 
to  deal  fairly  with  Kansas.  He  had  authorized  his  friend  J.  W. 
Forney,  the  Democratic  manager  in  Pennsylvania,  to  make 
pledges  to  that  effect  in  the  critical  campaign  for  the  presidential 
election  in  that  state.2  He  had  prevailed  on  Walker  to  go  to 
Kansas  as  governor  by  the  promise  of  support  in  an  impartial 
policy.  As  late  as  July,  1857,  he  wrote  to  Walker,  "On  the 

1  Another  article  forbade  any  amendment  whatever  of  the  constitution  for 
seven  years  and  prohibited  forever  any  amendment  which  affected  the  "rights 
of  property  in  the  ownership  of  slaves." 

2  Rhodes  (Vol.  II,  p.  229,  note)  quotes  Forney  in  the  New  York  Tribune  of 
September  3,  1858,  as  follows:  "There  is  not  a  county  in  Pennsylvania  in  which 
my  letters  may  not  be  found,  almost  by  hundreds,  pledging  Mr.  Buchanan,  in 
his  name  and  by  his  authority,  to  the  full,  complete,  and  practical  recognition 
of  the  rights  of  the  people  of  Kansas  to  decide  upon  their  own  affairs." 


506  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

question  of  submitting  the  constitution  to  the  bona  fide  resident 
settlers  of  Kansas,  I  am  willing  to  stand  or  fall."  Yet  when 
he  sent  in  his  first  annual  message  in  December  he  had  yielded 
completely  to  the  pressure  from  the  Southern  politicians.  He 
declared  that  the  Lecompton  Constitution  was  legal,  that  the 
forthcoming  vote  on  it  would  be  held  under  legitimate  author- 
ity, and  that  if  any  part  of  the  inhabitants  refused  to  vote,  it 
would  be  their  own  voluntary  act  and  they  alone  would  be 
responsible  for  the  consequences.  When  the  result  of  the 
fraudulent  vote  in  Kansas  reached  Washington,  Buchanan  sent 
the  Lecompton  Constitution  to  Congress  (February  2,  1858) 
with  a  special  message  recommending  the  admission  of  Kansas 
to  the  Union  under  its  provisions.  He  condemned  as  "  treason- 
able" the  refusal  of  the  free-state  men  to  vote  on  it.  This 
change  of  front  he  made  (-as  he  afterward  confessed  to  Forney) 
because  "  certain  Southern  states  had  threatened  that  if  he  did 
not  abandon  Walker  [who  resigned  in  disgust  on  December  15] 
they  would  be  compelled  either  to  secede  from  the  Union  or 
take  up  arms  against  him."  A  more  craven  deed  was  never 
committed  by  a  chief  magistrate  of  the  United  States. 

Douglas  protested  vigorously  against  this  travesty  of  popular 
sovereignty  in  Kansas  and  rebuked  President  Buchanan  to  his 
face.  When  the  Lecompton  Bill  came  before  the  Senate,  Douglas 
was  found  voting  with  strange  political  bedfellows, — Hale, 
Seward,  Wade,  and  Chase, — in  the  negative.  Still,  the  bill  to 
admit  Kansas  under  the  Lecompton  Constitution  passed  the 
Senate  on  May  23,  by  a  vote  of  33  to  25.  It  was  defeated  in 
the  House  a  few  days  later.  The  scheme  to  force  slavery  on 
Kansas  against  the  wishes  of  a  very  large  majority  of  its  settlers 
having  failed  in  Congress,  a  final  attempt  was  made  to  bribe 
the  people  of  Kansas  to  accept  the  constitution  of  their  own 
will.  William  H.  English  of  Indiana  introduced  a  bill  into  the 
House,  called  the  "Lecompton  Junior,"  which  provided  that 
the  whole  Lecompton  Constitution  should  be  resubmitted  to  the 
people,  and  that  its  adoption  should  carry  with  it  a  large  grant 
of  public  lands  to  the  state,  while  its  rejection  should  postpone 
any  further  bill  for  the  admission  of  Kansas  until  the  population 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  507 

• 

of  the  territory  should  reach  the  federal  ratio  of  93,000  in- 
habitants. The  English  Bill  passed  the  House.  But  even  then 
the  double  stimulus  of  a  bribe  and  a  penalty  failed  to  induce 
the  people  of  Kansas  to  accept  the  proslavery  constitution.  The 
plebiscite  on  August  2,  1858,  resulted  in  a  vote  of  1926  for  the 
constitution  and  11,812  against  it.  So  Kansas  remained  a 
territory,  theoretically  open  to  slavery  by  the  Dred  Scott 
decision  but  actually  closed  to  it  by  the  increasing  preponder- 
ance of  free-soil  inhabitants,  until  the  withdrawal  from  Congress 
of  the  members  from  the  Southern  states  on  the  eve  of  the  Civil 
War.  On  January  21,  1861,  the  turbulent  seven  years7  history 
of  the  Kansas  Territory  came  to  a  close  with  its  quiet  admission 
to  the  Union  as  a  free  state. 

Already,  before  the  final  rejection  of  the  Lecompton  Consti- 
tution by  the  people  of  Kansas,  the  attention  of  the  country 
was  drawn  to  an  exciting  contest  in  another  Western  state. 
Douglas's  second  term  in  the  Senate  was  about  to  expire,  and 
he  returned  to  Illinois  in  the  summer  of  1858  to  make  his  can- 
vass for  reelection.  He  was  the  most  popular  man  in  the  country 
above  Mason  and  Dixon's  line.  The  Northern  Democrats  were 
with  him  to  a  man  for  his  courageous  opposition  to  the  admin- 
istration in  the  Lecompton  affair.  Many  of  the  Republicans, 
even,  favored  his  return  to  the  Senate  by  the  legislature  of  Illi- 
nois, believing  that  his  complete  breach  with  the  Buchanan  ad- 
ministration would  make  him  a  more  effective  foe  to  the  slave 
interests  and  a  more  disruptive  force  in  the  Democratic  party 
than  any  Republican  whom  they  could  nominate.  Even  Horace 
Greeley,  in  the  New  York  Tribune,  urged  the  Republicans  of 
Illinois  not  to  put  up  a  candidate  against  Douglas.  But  the 
more  clear-sighted  Republicans  were  under  no  illusion  that 
Douglas  would  come  over  to  their  position.  They  applauded 
his  stand  on  the  Lecompton  Bill ;  but  they  knew  that  the  man 
who  had  engineered  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise,  who 
expressed  his  hearty  concurrence  in  the  Dred  Scott  decision,  and 
who  repeatedly  declared  that  he  "didn't  care  whether  slavery 
was  voted  up  or  voted  down/'  so  long 'as  the  people  concerned 
voted  honestly,  could  never  be  indorsed  by  a  party  whose  funda- 


508  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

mental  tenet  was  opposition  to  the  extension  of  slavery  in  the 
territories  of  the  United  States.  So  the  Republicans  nominated 
Abraham  Lincoln  to  oppose  Douglas  in  the  campaign  to  win  the 
legislature  which  was  to  choose  the  United  States  Senator 
from  Illinois. 

Lincoln,  like  Douglas,  was  a  self-made  man,  born  in  poverty 
to  a  life  of  toil.  Like  Douglas  he  had  moved  to  Illinois  as  a  youth 
and  had  engaged  in  the  practice  of  law.  But  the  career  of  the 
two  equally  ambitious  men  was  most  unequal.  While  Douglas 
had  rapidly  attained  high  political  honors  in  the  state  and 
served  two  terms  in  the  House  and  two  in  the  Senate  at  Wash- 
ington,— always  prominent,  and  since  the  death  of  Clay  and  Web- 
ster preeminent, — Lincoln's  public  honors  had  been  limited 
to  a  few  years  in  the  Illinois  legislature  and  a  single  term 
(1847-1849)  in  the  House  of  Representatives.  Although  he 
rose  steadily  to  be  one  of  the  best  lawyers  in  Illinois,  Lincoln 
became  reluctantly  convinced  that  Fortune  had  reserved  all 
her  favors  for  the  "  Little  Giant,"  whom  he  had  looked  on  as 
his  rival  for  years.  He  confessed  that  he  "was  beginning  to 
lose  interest  in  politics,"  when  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Com- 
promise roused  him.  Slavery  had  always  been  abhorrent  to 
him.  As  early  as  1837  he  had  protested,  with  one  lone  com- 
panion in  the  Illinois  legislature,  against  a  resolution  that  the 
right  of  property  in  slaves  was  "sacred"  in  the  Southern  states. 
He  then  placed  on  the  records  his  opinion  that  slavery  was 
"founded  on  both  injustice  and  bad  policy."  During  his  term 
in  Congress  he  had  voted  over  and  over  again  for  the  Wilmot 
Proviso.  He  now  became  an  enthusiastic  member  of  the  new  Re- 
publican party.  By  the  summer  of  1858  he  was  the  most  prom- 
inent Republican  in  Illinois,  although  outside  of  the  state  he  was 
known,  if  at  all,  only  as  a  clever  lawyer  with  an  inexhausti- 
ble repertoire  of  humorous  stories,  not  always  free  from  coarse- 
ness, and  a  rather  melancholy  and  meditative  nature,  which  was 
kindled  to  a  clear,  intense  purpose  by  the  appeal  of  injured  inno- 
cence or  the  threatened  triumph  of  injustice. 

In  his  speech  of  acceptance  of  the  nomination  for  the  senator- 
ship,  before  the  delegates  of  the  state  convention  at  Springfield, 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  509 

June  1 6,  1858,  Lincoln  stated  the  issue  of  the  campaign  with 
force  and  clearness:  "We  are  now  far  into  the  fifth  year  since 
a  policy  was  initiated  with  the  avowed  object  and  confident 
promise  of  putting  an  end  to  the  slavery  agitation.  Under  the 
operation  of  that  policy  the  agitation  has  not  only  not  ceased, 
but  has  constantly  augmented.  In  my  opinion  it  will  not  cease 
until  a  crisis  shall  have  been  reached  and  passed.  'A  house 
divided  against  itself  cannot  stand.'  I  believe  that  this  govern- 
ment cannot  endure  permanently  half  slave  and  half  free.  I  do 
not  expect  the  Union  to  be  dissolved — I  do  not  expect  the  house 
to  fall — but  I  do  expect  it  will  cease  to  be  divided.  Either  the 
opponents  of  slavery  will  arrest  the  further  spread  of  it,  and 
place  it  where  the  public  mind  shall  rest  in  the  belief  that  it  is 
in  the  course  of  ultimate  extinction ;  or  its  advocates  will  push 
it  forward  till  it  shall  become  alike  lawful  in  all  the  states,  old 
as  well  as  new — North  as  well  as  South."  Three  weeks  later 
Douglas  was  welcomed  home  with  a  magnificent  reception  in 
Chicago  and  began  his  canvass  of  the  state  in  a  special  train 
gaily  decorated.  He  knew  in  his  heart  that  he  had  a  dangerous 
antagonist  in  Lincoln,  but  he  affected  to  treat  him  with  patroniz- 
ing condescension,  as  "a  kind,  amiable  and  intelligent  gen- 
tleman." With  characteristic  effrontery  he  misrepresented 
Lincoln's  prophecy  of  the  cessation  of  the  divided  house  as  a 
plea  for  "a  war  of  the  sections  until  one  or  the  other  shall  be  sub- 
dued," and  intimated  that  Lincoln's  criticism  of  the  Dred  Scott 
case  was  an  appeal  from  the  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court  of 
the  land  "to  the  decision  of  a  tumultuous  town  meeting." 

After  several  attempts  to  correct  the  persistent  misrepresen- 
tations of  his  opponent,  in  a  kind  of  hide-and-seek  game,  Lincoln 
suggested  that  they  discuss  the  subject  of  slavery  from  the  same 
platform  in  a  series  of  joint  debates.  Seven  towns  were  sched- 
uled in  different  sections  of  the  state.  The  debates  were  begun 
at  Ottawa  in  August  and  closed  at  Alton,  the  scene  of  Love- 
joy's  murder,  in  October.  The  rivals  spoke  from  a  platform  in 
the  open  air,  before  thousands,  who  turned  out  from  all  the 
houses  in  the  towns  and  drove  miles  in  buggies  and  carryalls 
from  the  farms  around.  But  the  real  audience  extended  far 


510  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

beyond  the  limits  of  Illinois.  New  England  followed  the  de- 
bates with  eager  interest.  Long  extracts  from  the  speeches  were 
published  in  the  papers  of  St.  Louis,  New  York,  and  Cincinnati. 
The  administration  at  Washington,  on  the  other  hand,  for  whom 
Douglas  was  a  rebel  and  Lincoln  a  crude  country  lawyer,  re- 
garded the  whole  affair  as  a  rather  disreputable  exhibition 
by  "a  pair  of  depraved,  blustering,  mischievous,  low-down 
demagogues." 

At  first  Lincoln  appeared  at  a  disadvantage,  "with  his  thin 
voice,  his  awkward  figure,  his  yellow  dry-wrinkled  face,  his 
oddity  of  pose  and  his  diffident  movements,"  in  contrast  with 
Douglas's  easy  bearing  and  confident  eloquence.  But  as  the 
debates  proceeded  Lincoln's  clarity  of  reasoning  and  honesty 
of  mind  told  more  and  more  against  his  rival's  skill  in  debate. 
The  directness  of  his  answers  to  Douglas's  questions  and  the 
searching  character  of  the  questions  which  he  put  to  Doug- 
las converted  the  latter's  aggressiveness  into  defense.  Lincoln' 
showed  the  speciousness  of  Douglas's  contention  that  slavery 
was  one  of  those  " local  institutions"  whose  variety  was  one  of 
the  surest  bonds  of  our  Union.  Slavery  had  never  been  any- 
thing but  a  source  of  strife,  and  the  doctrine  of  popular  sov- 
ereignty had  been  "a  living,  creeping  lie  from  the  time  of  its 
introduction  till  today."  The  " fathers"  had  not  anticipated 
a  permanent  Union  half  slave  and  half  free.  They  had  endured 
slavery  only  because  they  had  believed  that  it  was  destined  ere 
long  to  pass  away.  It  was  not  the  abolitionists,  as  Douglas 
maintained,  who  had  raised  all  the  pother  about  slavery  in 
the  territories.  It  was  Douglas  himself,  by  his  wanton  repeal 
of  the  Missouri  Compromise.  "Why  could  you  not  leave 
slavery  alone?"  asked  Lincoln. 

He  asked  Douglas  another  question  in  the  debate  at  Freeport, 
which  made  national  history.  "Can  the  people  of  a  United 
States  Territory,  in  any  lawful  way,  against  the  wishes  of  any 
citizen  of  the  United  States,  exclude  slavery  from  its  limits, 
prior  to  the  formation  of  a  state  constitution?"  If  Douglas 
answered  No,  he  would  deny  his  pet  doctrine  of  popular  sov- 
ereignty ;  if  he  answered  Yes,  he  would  antagonize  the  dominant 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  511 

politicians  of  the  South,  led  by  Jefferson  Davis,  who  maintained 
that  the  only  power  that  could  deal  with  slavery  was  the 
municipal  law  of  a  state,  and  furthermore  he  would  set  the  local 
authority  of  the  territory  above  the  Supreme  Court,  which 
had  declared  slavery  legal  in  all  the  territories  of  the  United 
States  by  the  Dred  Scott  decision.  Douglas  answered  the  ques- 
tion in  the  affirmative  and  tried  to  wriggle  out  of  the  trap  by 
declaring  that  although  slavery  might  be  "legal"  in  a  territory, 
it  could  not  actually  exist  for  a  day  or  an  hour  where  the  peo- 
ple enacted  legislation  " unfriendly"  to  it.  That  was  the  famous 
"Freeport  Doctrine."  It  was  a  poor  answer  from  the  point 
of  view  of  logic  and  was  neatly  paraphrased  by  Lincoln  in 
the  paradox  that  a  thing  might  then  be  legally  excluded  from 
a  place  where  it  had  a  legal  right  to  exist.  But  from  the  point 
of  view  of  expediency  it  was  the  only  answer  that  Douglas 
could  give.  For  to  deny  the  doctrine  of  popular  sovereignty, 
which  was  emblazoned  all  over  the  state  as  his  great  invention, 
would  have  meant  his  sure  defeat  for  the  Illinois  senatorship. 
Lincoln  was  looking  beyond  the  Illinois  senatorship,  much  as 
he  wanted  it.  He  knew  that  the  answer  which  won  that  honor 
for  Douglas  would  lose  him  the  greater  honor  of  the  presidency 
of  the  United  States.  For  the  Southern  Democracy,  which  had 
voted  for  Douglas's  bill  in  1854  for  the  sake  of  annulling  the 
Missouri  Compromise,  had  now  advanced,  under  the  encourage- 
ment of  the  Dred  Scott  decision,  to  the  position  that  the  national 
government  should  positively  protect  slavery,  as  it  protected 
property  generally,  in  all  the  common  territories  of  the  United 
States.  Douglas  won  the  senatorship  by  the  narrow  margin 
of  eight  votes  in  the  Illinois  legislature.  Lincoln  won  a  reputa- 
tion throughout  the  North  as  the  most  able  defender  of  the 
free-soil  cause.  After  all,  the  climax  of  the  contest  was  not 
the  clever  challenge  to  Douglas  at  Freeport  but  the  fine  ethical 
note  struck  by  Lincoln  in  the  closing  debate  at  Alton :  "  Where 
is  the  philosophy  or  statesmanship  based  on  the  assumption 
that  we  are  to  quit  talking  about  slavery  and  that  the  public 
mind  is  all  at  once  to  cease  being  agitated  about  it?  Yet  this 
is  the  policy  that  Douglas  is  advocating.  ...  I  ask  you  if  it 


512  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

is  not  a  false  philosophy.  Is  it  not  a  false  statesmanship  that 
undertakes  to  build  up  a  policy  upon  the  basis  of  caring  nothing 
about  the  very  thing  that  everybody  does  care  most  about  ?  .  .  . 
That  is  the  issue  which  will  continue  in  this  country  when  the 
poor  tongues  of  Judge  Douglas  and  myself  shall  be  silent.  It 
is  the  eternal  struggle  between  two  principles,  Right  and  Wrong, 
throughout  the  world." 

The  elections  of  the  autumn  of  1858  saw  decisive  gains  for  the 
Republicans  and  the  antiadministration  Democrats.  The  for- 
mer won  21  seats  in  the  House,  where,  by  coalition  with  the 
"Know-No things,"  they  could  outvote  the  Democrats.  This  re- 
sult must  be  taken  as  a  condemnation  by  the  North  of  the  Le- 
compton  fraud,  although  the  victory  of  the  Republicans  in 
Buchanan's  own  state  was  due  largely  to  economic  causes ;  for 
the  low  nonpartisan  tariff  of  1857  had  hit  the  iron  interests  of 
Pennsylvania  hard,  and  a  severe  financial  panic  which  broke  on 
the  country  in  the  autumn  of  1857  brought  its  inevitable  reac- 
tion against  the  administration.  The  panic  was  due  to  overspec- 
ulation,  overextension  of  credit,  the  inflation  of  the  currency  by 
great  quantities  of  gold  found  in  California  and  Australia,  and 
the  excessive  conversion  of  fluid  capital  into  fixed  capital  in 
railroads,  factories,  and  public  works.  The  remarkable  pros- 
perity of  the  country,  which  we  studied  in  the  first  section  of 
this  chapter,  lasted  for  a  full  decade — from  the  passage  of  the 
Walker  tariff  in  1846  to  the  end  of  Pierce's  administration.  Our 
population  increased  from  23,000,000  to  30,000,000,  the  rate 
of  increase  in  the  cities  being  78  per  cent.  In  1850  there  were 
some  6000  miles  of  railroads,  in  short  stretches  of  seldom  more 
than  100  miles.  It  was  impossible  to  go  from  New  York  to 
Boston  or  Albany  without  breaking  the  journey.  Ten  years 
later  the  mileage  had  increased  to  over  30,000,  and  New  York 
was  linked  to  points  west  of  the  Mississippi.  Nearly  80  per 
cent  of  the  total  mileage  of  the  country  on  the  eve  of  the  Civil 
War  had  been  laid  within  a  decade,  at  a  cost  of  $700,000,000. 
"Premature  railroads  at  the  West," says  Schouler,"had  fostered 
premature  cities,  teeming  with  premature  traffic  for  premature 
population."  The  customary  wave  of  extravagant  living  fol- 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  513 

lowed  flush  times.  We  went  heavily  in  debt  to  Europe  for  im- 
ported luxuries.  In  the  nine  years  from  the  discovery  of  gold 
in  California  to  the  outbreak  of  the  panic  the  excess  of  imports 
over  exports  of  merchandise  was  $336,000,000,  and  the  excess 
of  exports  over  imports  of  specie  was  $2  71,000,000.  The  liquid 
capital  that  was  not  being  converted  into  fixed  forms  was  go- 
ing to  Europe  to  pay  our  debts.  The  crash  came  in  October, 
when  the  Ohio  Life  Insurance  and  Trust  Company  of  Cincinnati 
failed  for  $7,000,000.  Large  business  houses,  banks,  and  fac- 
tories closed  their  doors.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  men  in  the 
North  and  West  were  thrown  out  of  employment,  while  in- 
flated prices  caused  untold  suffering.1 

The  panic  of  1857  contributed  not  a  little  to  the  tension 
between  the  sections.  While  the  Northern  industries  were 
paralyzed,  the  cotton  crops  of  the  South  were  large,  the  prices 
were  well  sustained,  and  the  exports  were  moupting.  "Cotton  is 
King ! "  cried  Hammond  of  South  Carolina  in  the  Senate. 
"When  you  came  to  a  deadlock  and  revolutions  were  threatened 
.  .  .  we  poured  in  on  you  1,600,000  bales  of  cotton  just  at  the 
crisis  to  save  you."  "The  wealth  of  the  South,"  said  De  Bow, 
in  his  famous  Review,  "is  permanent  and  real :  that  o.f  the  North 
is  fugitive  and  fictitious."  If  anything  was  needed  to  confirm 
the  South  in  its  conviction  that  slavery  was  an  economic  blessing 
to  be  nurtured  and  extended  at  all  costs,  it  was  just  this  bitter 
experience  of  the  North  in  1857.  Only  the  Southerners  made 
the  mistake  of  taking  a  temporary  embarrassment  for  the  break- 
down of  a  whole  industrial  system. 

There  were  many  signs  in  the  Congress  which  convened  in 
December,  1858,  that  the  South  meant  to  brook  no  further 
restrictions  on  its  peculiar  institution.  Frustrated  in  the  hope 
of  making  Kansas  a  slave  state,  the  South  turned  longing  eyes 

1  Mayor  Wood  of  New  York  recommended  that  the  city  purchase  50,000  bar- 
rels of  flour  and  large  quantities  of  provisions  to  be  sold  to  the  workmen  at  cost. 
Thousands  of  the  unemployed  marched  in  processions,  bearing  banners  demand- 
ing work  and  bread,  or  met  in  mass  meetings  to  denounce  "the  rich  who  lived 
at  ease  while  the  workers  starved."  It  was  deemed  necessary  to  bring  soldiers 
from  Governor's  Island  to  guard  the  Subtreasury  building  in  Wall  Street. 


514  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

on  Cuba,  Mexico,  and  Central  America.  Slidell  of  Louisiana  in- 
troduced a  bill  into  the  Senate  appropriating  $30,000,000  for 
negotiations  with  Spain  for  the  purchase  of  Cuba,  but  in  spite 
of  the  support  of  the  administration  he  failed  to  get  the  bill 
through.  Buchanan  himself  had  asked  Congress  to  support  this 
project,  speaking  in  his  message  of  1858,  in  language  which  re- 
called the  Ostend  Manifesto  of  four  years  before,  of  "circum- 
stances which  might  make  the  seizure  of  Cuba  justifiable  under 
the  law  of  self-preservation."  The  President  also  favored  a 
protectorate  over  the  northern  part  of  Mexico  and  in  1859 
actually  suggested  an  invasion  of  the  country  for  the  sake  of 
"restoring  order."  Leading  Southerners,  like  Alexander  H. 
Stephens  of  Georgia,  were  outspoken  in  their  sympathy  for 
William  Walker;  a  noted  filibusterer,  who  in  1856  had  inter- 
vened in  the  civil  wars  of  Nicaragua,  expelled  the  dictator  Rivas, 
and  made  himself  president  of  the  republic.  When  Walker 
was  arrested  by  an  American  naval  officer  and  brought  to 
the  United  States  to  be  tried  for  the  infraction  of  the  neutrality 
laws,  no  jury  could  be  found  in  New  Orleans  to  convict  him. 
Of  course  the  interest  in  Spanish  America,  under  whatever  form 
of  "benevolent  assimilation"  it  was  disguised,  was  the  quest  for 
new  slave  lands.  These  plans  came  to  naught,  but  the  boldest 
of  all  the  schemes  of  the  Southern  oligarchy  was  the  reopening 
of  the  foreign  slave  trade.  A  commercial  convention  at  Vicks- 
burg,  in  May,  1859,  resolved  by  a  vote  of  49  to  19  that  "all 
laws,  state  or  national,  forbidding  the  African  slave  trade,  ought 
to  be  repealed."  It  cost  the  planter  from  $i  500  to  $2000  to  buy 
a  first-class  negro  in  Virginia  or  Kentucky,  while  he  might 
have  plenty  from  the  Guinea  coast  for  one  third  of  that  price. 
A  score  of  American  slavers  were  reported  off  the  coast  of  Africa 
in  the  closing  years  of  the  decade,  and  when  they  brought  their 
cargoes  openly  into  the  Southern  ports,  in  defiance  of  the  pro- 
hibition of  1808  and  the  Piracy  Act  of  1820,  the  juries  refused 
to  condemn  their  captains  or  owners.  Hammond  confessed  in 
the  Senate  that  the  sentiment  of  his  section  was  "not  in  accord 
with  the  laws  of  the  United  States  on  this  subject."  And 
Douglas  is  the  authority  for  the  statement  that  during  the  year 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  515 

1859  no  less  than  15,000  African  slaves  were  landed  in  the 
Southern  states. 

Every  public  question  came  now  to  be  treated  in  Congress 
solely  from  the  standpoint  of  its  bearing  on  the  great  sectional 
issue.  When  the  Northerners  tried  to  get  a  Pacific  railroad  bill 
passed,  Iverson  of  Georgia  frankly  acknowledged  his  belief  that 
the  Union  would  soon  be  divided,  and  refused  to  vote  for  a  road 
which  "would  lie  outside  a  Southern  confederacy."  When  a 
Homestead  Bill,  granting  Western  lands  to  settlers  on  easy 
terms,  was  passed  by  the  House  (with  only  three  favorable 
votes  from  the  slaveholding  states),  it  was  shelved  in  the  Senate. 
The  Southerners  saw  in  this  measure  giving  "land  to  the  land- 
less" only  national  encouragement  to  the  free-state  emigration 
which  had  robbed  them  of  Kansas.  As  the  sectional  strife  grew 
more  bitter,  the  tone  of  the  debates  grew  more  menacing:  ex- 
postulation and  protest  stiffened  into  the  demand  of  the  ulti- 
matum. Concession  was  looked  on  askance  as  incipient  treason 
to  the  section.  The  press  was  unbridled  in  its  language  of 
vituperation.  Sheets  like  the  Richmond  Enquirer  and  De  Bow's 
Review  spoke  of  the  Northerners  as  if  they  were  already  the 
inhabitants  of  a  hostile  foreign  country,  calling  them  "the  worst 
bigots  on  earth"  and  "the  meanest  of  tyrants,  who  had  never 
had  the  slightest  conception  of  what  constitutes  true  liberty." 

Before  the  new  Congress  assembled  in  December,  1859  (the 
last  Congress  for  more  than  a  decade  in  which  all  the  states  of 
the  Union  were  represented),  an  event  occurred  which  was  mag- 
nified far  beyond  its  intrinsic  importance,  owing  to  the  tense, 
nervous  condition  of  the  country.  John  Brown,  the  sinister 
hero  of  the  Pottawatomie  murders,  brooding  on  his  commission 
from  God  to  put  an  end  to  slavery,  conceived  the  wild  scheme  of 
carrying  the  war  into  the  enemy's  country  with  an  "army"  of 
nineteen  men.  His  plan  was  to  establish  camps  in  the  Piedmont 
region  of  the  Appalachians,  whence  his  followers  could  conduct 
raids  on  the  neighboring  plantations,  to  incite  the  slaves  to 
desert  their  masters  and  join  the  ranks  of  freedom.  Money 
and  arms  for  this  undertaking  were  fraudulently  collected  in 
the  North,  under  the  disguise  of  a  renewed  expedition  against 


51 6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  slaveholders  in  Kansas.  Not  more  than  four  or  five  "  choice 
friends"  were  in  the  secret  of  Brown's  real  purpose,  although 
rumors  began  to  get  abroad  in  the  summer  of  1859,  and  the 
Secretary  of  War,  Floyd,  received  an  anonymous  letter  from 
Cincinnati,  in  August,  warning  him  of  the  whole  plot. 

On  the  night  of  October  16  Brown's  little  band  seized  the 
Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railroad  bridge  crossing  from  the  Mary- 
land side  of  the  Potomac  to  the  Virginia  village  of  Harpers 
Ferry.  They  cut  the  telegraph  wires,  occupied  the  United 
States  arsenal,  and  began  their  campaign  of  liberation  by  visit- 
ing the  plantation  of  Colonel  Lewis  Washington  at  the  dead  of 
night,  arresting  the  owner,  and  inviting  his  bewildered  negroes 
to  join  the  banners  of  freedom.  The  next  morning  the  citizens 
of  Harpers  Ferry  seized  their  arms.  Brown,  cut  off  from  re- 
treat to  the  Maryland  side,  barricaded  himself  with  his  followers 
and  his  hostages  in  the  engine  house  in  the  armory  yard,  where 
he  conducted  a  desperate  defense.  Colonel  Robert  E.  Lee 
arrived  on  the  scene  in  the  evening  with  a  band  of  United 
States  marines,  and  on  the  morning  of  the  eighteenth,  when 
Brown  refused  to  surrender,  they  battered  down  the  doors  of 
the  engine  house.  Brown  himself,  severely  wounded,  and  four 
of  his  followers  were  taken  prisoners.  Ten  of  his  men  had  been 
killed  in  the  "  siege."  The  other  four  escaped.  Brown  was 
promptly  tried  in  a  Virginia  court,  found  guilty  of  treason,  and 
publicly  hanged  on  December  2,  manifesting  the  utmost  com- 
posure to  the  end.  Armed  invasion  in  Virginia,  like  stealthy 
murder  in  Kansas,  was  "the  Lord's  work"  in  his  eyes.  Legality 
had  no  meaning  for  him.  Prudence  and  failure  were  words 
unknown  in  his  vocabulary.  John  Brown's  raid  at  Harpers 
Ferry  was  a  pitiable  escapade  of  a  fanatic  with  a  handful  of 
hypnotized  satellites.  But  seen  through  the  distorting  medium 
of  sectional  hostility  it  assumed  in  the  Southerners'  eyes  the 
dimensions  of  a  widespread  plot  to  incite  a  slave  rebellion,  sup- 
ported and  encouraged  by  the  Republican  leaders ;  while  men 
as  sane  as  Emerson,  Theodore  Parker,  and  Thoreau  at  the 
North  glorified  John  Brown  as  a  martyr  and  even  compared  him 
to  Christ  on  the  cross. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  517 

The  year  1860  was  the  most  fateful  in  our  history,  for  it  saw 
the  house  divided  against  itself.  In  the  Congress  which  met 
three  days  after  John  Brown  was  hanged  the  Democrats  still 
had  a  majority  in  the  slowly  changing  Senate  (37  to  26),  but  in 
the  House  there  were  109  Republicans,  101  Democrats  (of  whom 
13  were  against  the  administration),  26  "  Know-No  things," 
and  one  Whig.  The  contest  for  the  Speakership  was  an  eight 
weeks'  battle  between  the  sections  north  and  south  of  Mason 
and  Dixon's  line.  John  Sherman  of  Ohio  was  the  most  promi- 
nent Republican  candidate,  but  failed  of  election  because  he 
had  allowed  his  name  to  be  used  in  the  indorsement  of  a  book 
entitled,  "The  Impending  Crisis  of  the  South,  and  How  to  Meet 
It,"  written  by  Hilton  R.  Helper,  a  poor  white  of  North  Carolina. 
While  " Uncle  Tom's  Cabin"  had  attacked  slavery  in  behalf 
of  the  abused  negro,  Helper's  book  denounced  the  oligarchy  of 
the  slaveholders  as  fatal  to  the  progress  of  the  millions  of  whites 
of  the  middle  and  lower  classes  in  the  South.  Slavery  must  go 
in  order  to  give  the  whites  their  rightful  place  in  the  economic 
and  social  life  of  the  section,  to  introduce  a  varied  industry  and 
commerce,  to  foster  thriving  cities  and  free  schools.  It  would 
have  been  a  far  more  dangerous  book  than  " Uncle  Tom's  Cabin" 
for  the  slave-holders,  had  the  class  for  whom  it  was  written  been 
able  to  read  its  arguments  and  comprehend  its  statistics.  Its 
chief  use  was  as  a  campaign  document  in  the  North,  where  it 
was  widely  circulated.  Its  indorsement  by  prominent  Repub- 
licans was  regarded  by  the  South  as  an  insult. 

As  the  battle  for  the  Speakership  lengthened,  the  passions 
on  each  side  grew  fiercer.  The  Southerners  charged  Northern 
statesmen  of  the  highest  standing,  like  William  H.  Seward,  with 
complicity  in  John  Brown's  raid.  The  Northerners  met  threats 
of  disunion  either  with  scorn,  or  with  grim  sarcasm  as  to  the 
obvious  disparity  between  "eighteen  millions  of  men  reared  to 
industry,  with  habits  of  the  right  kind"  and  "eight  millions  of 
men  without  these  auxiliaries."  Taunts  and  insults  were  ex- 
changed. Challenges  to  duels  followed.  Several  times  the 
House  seemed  on  the  point  of  indulging  in  a  general  fight. 
Senator  Hammond  wrote  to  Francis  Lieber,  in  April,  1860, 


5i8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

"As  I  believe,  every  man  in  both  Houses  is  armed  with  a 
revolver — some  with  two — and  a  bowie  knife."1  The  repre- 
sentatives from  North  and  South  to  the  Congress  of  the  common 
Union  met  rather  in  the  spirit  of  the  mutually  suspicious  delega- 
tions from  the  camps  of  Caesar  and  Ariovistus ! 

On  the  first  of  February,  1860,  Pennington  of  New  Jersey 
was  elected  Speaker  on  the  forty-fourth  ballot.  The  next  day 
Jefferson  Davis  presented  in  the  Senate  a  set  of  resolutions 
which  embodied  the  ultimatum  of  the  radical  leaders  of  the 
South  and  were  intended  as  a  platform  on  which  any  candidate 
for  the  presidential  nomination  in  the  coming  Democratic  con- 
vention must  stand  in  order  to  be  acceptable  to  the  slaveholders. 
The  Davis  resolutions  affirmed  Calhoun's  doctrine  of  state 
sovereignty,  called  upon  Congress  to  protect  slavery  in  the  ter- 
ritories, demanded  the  faithful  execution  of  the  Fugitive-Slave 
Act,  and  denounced  Douglas's  Freeport  Doctrine  by  declaring 
that  "neither  Congress  nor  a  territorial  legislature,  by  direct 
or  indirect  legislation,  has  the  power  to  annul  or  impair  the 
constitutional  right  of  any  citizen  to  take  his  slave  property 
into  the  common  territories  and  there  hold  and  enjoy  the  same 
while  the  territorial  condition  remains." 

The  South  had  spoken  through  the  mouth  of  the  statesman 
who  was  destined  in  another  twelvemonth  to  be  called  to  preside 
over  her  fortunes  as  an  independent  confederacy.  The  answer 
from  the  North  came  from  the  man  who  was  destined  to  bear 
the  enormous  responsibility  for  preserving  the  Union.  Abra- 
ham Lincoln's  fame  had  been  growing  steadily  since  his  debates 
with  Douglas.  He  had  spoken  frequently  before  large  audiences 
in  the  Western  states,  but  was  not  heard  in  the  East  until  the 
Young  Men's  Republican  Club  of  New  York  invited  him,  early 
in  1860,  to  speak  in  the  great  hall  of  Cooper  Union.  As  he  faced 

1  Thirty-five  years  later  Mr.  Grow  of  Pennsylvania,  one  of  the  candidates  for 
Speaker  in  the  exciting  contest  of  1859-1860,  said  to  Frederick  Bancroft:  "Dur- 
ing the  period  just  before  the  War,  every  member  [of  Congress]  intended  to  take 
his  revolver  as  his  hat  when  he  went  to  the  Capitol.  For  some  time,  a  New 
Englander  who  had  formerly  been  a  clergyman  was  the  only  exception.  There 
was  much  quiet  jesting  in  the  House  when  it  became  known  that  he  too  had 
purchased  a  pistol"  (Bancroft,  "Life  of  Seward,"  Vol.  I.  p.  503). 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  519 

his  distinguished  audience  on  the  evening  of  February  27,  his 
uncouth  appearance  in  ill-fitting  clothes,  his  awkward  gestures 
and  high-pitched  voice,  at  first  created  an  unfavorable  im- 
pression. But  this  disappeared  rapidly  as  he  proceeded  with 
masterly  logic  and  burning  conviction  to  unfold  his  thesis  of 
the  consonance  of  the  Republican  doctrine  with  the  spirit  and 
purpose  of  the  men  who  founded  the  American  State.  He 
denied  that  it  was  the  North  who  had  brought  the  question  of 
slavery  into  a  new  and  dangerous  prominence.  It  was  the  South, 
with  its  mounting  demands,  with  its  threat  to  destroy  the  gov- 
ernment unless  "allowed  to  construe  and  enforce  the  Consti- 
tution as  it  pleased,"  with  its  determination  to  "rule  or  ruin," 
with  its  ultimatum  to  the  North  "to  cease  to  call  slavery  wrong 
and  join  [them]  in  calling  it  right."  He  concluded  with  a 
strong  appeal  to  the  party  to  stand  by  its  principles  in  spite  of 
false  accusations.  "Let  us  have  faith  that  right  makes  might, 
and  in  that  faith  let  us  to  the  end  dare  to  do  our  duty  as  we 
understand  it." 

The  Democratic  nominating  convention  met  at  Charleston, 
April  23.  Douglas  was  the  unanimous  choice  of  the  Northern 
wing  of  the  party,  but  his  Freeport  Doctrine  had  killed  him 
in  the  South.  He  was  regarded  by  the  Davis  following  as  no 
better  than  Seward — worse  even,  because  he  was  a  renegade. 
The  committee  on  platform,  by  a  vote  of  17  to  16,  adopted 
the  .Southern  program  condemning  the  doctrine  of  popular 
sovereignty.  But  the  convention  as  a  whole,  in  which  the 
Northern  delegates  had  a  decided  majority,  rejected  the  plat- 
form and  supported  Douglas  by  a  vote  of  165  to  138.  There- 
upon the  Alabama  delegation,  headed  by  William  L.  Yancey, 
reputed  the  first  orator  and  the  most  decided  disunionist  of 
the  South,  left  the  hall.  The  majority  of  the  delegates  from 
Mississippi,  Louisiana,  South  Carolina,  Florida,  Texas,  Ar- 
kansas, and  Georgia  followed  amid  intense  excitement,  bidding 
good-by  to  their  Northern  colleagues  in  speeches  of  pathetic 
warning  and  dire  prophecy.  Only  253  delegates  were  left,  and 
as  a  two-thirds  majority  of  the  whole  convention  was  necessary 
to  the  choice  of  a  candidate,  Douglas  failed  to  get  the  nomina- 


Electoral    Popular 
Vote        Vote 


In  Free    In  Slave 
States      States 


Lincoln           ISO  1.866,452  1.840.022-  26.430 

Breckinridge    72  849,781  279.728  570.053 

|p;JBell                   39  588,879  72.906  515.973 

Douglas            12  1.376.957  1,212.432  164.525 

Circles  in  each  state  show  vote  of  candidate 

receiving  largest  minority 
Numbers'  in  parenthesis  in  each  state  show 

electoral  vote 


Map  Plate,  Patented  July  5,  1921    •    Method  of  Making  Maps,  Patented  July  5,  1921 


THE  PRESIDENTIAL 
ELECTION  OF  1860 


520  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

tion  in  57  ballots.  On  May  3  the  convention  adjourned,  to 
reassemble  at  Baltimore  on  June  18.  The  bolting  radicals  of 
the  South  thus  chose  deliberately  to  split  the  great  Democratic 
party  and  virtually  assure  the  election  of  a  Republican  presi- 
dent rather  than  abide  by  the  Douglas  doctrine,  which  they  had 
enthusiastically  indorsed  in  their  Cincinnati  platform  four  years 
before.  In  June  the  convention  at  Baltimore  nominated  Doug- 
las and  Hershel  V.  Johnson  of  Georgia  as  the  regular  Demo- 
cratic ticket,  while  the  bolters,  meeting  in  the  same  city,  named 
John  Breckinridge  of  Kentucky  and  Joseph  Lane  of  Oregon. 

Meanwhile  two  other  tickets  had  been  placed  in  the  field. 
The  remnants  of  the  old  Whig  party,  joined  by  the  "Know- 
Nothings,"  met  at  Baltimore,  on  May  9,  as  the  Constitutional 
Union  party  and  nominated  John  Bell  of  Tennessee  and  Edward 
Everett  of  Massachusetts  on  a  platform  which  sought  to  allay 
the  bitter  struggle  over  slavery  by  ignoring  its  cause.  Their 
brief  declaration  consisted  of  three  platitudes:  "The  Consti- 
tution of  the  country,  the  Union  of  the  states,  and  the  enforce- 
ment of  the  laws."  Such  a  party  at  such  a  crisis  could  serve 
only  as  a  refuge  for  the  halting  and  the  unconvinced. 

The  Republicans  met  at  Chicago,  on  May  i6;  in  a  huge 
structure  called  the  "Wigwam."  Ten  thousand  people  crowded 
into  the  hall,  and  other  tens  of  thousands  flocked  to  the  city 
to  clamor  in  vain  for  admission.  It  was  generally  expected  that 
William  H.  Seward  would  be  the  nominee.  He  was  the  leader  of 
the  party  in  Congress  and  the  most  prominent  exponent  of  the 
Republican  principles  in  the  country.  It  was  to  him  that  the 
Southern  statesmen  referred  when  they  threatened  disunion 
in  case  of  the  election  of  a  "Black  Republican  President."  But 
there  were  points  in  Seward's  record  which  injured  his  avail- 
ability. He  was  in  the  closest  intimacy  with  Thurlow  Weed, 
a  powerful  political  manager  in  Albany,  who  was  suspected  of 
a  deal  with  the  traction  companies  of  New  York  City  to  raise 
huge  sums  for  the  Republican  campaign ; *  and  he  had  the  en- 

1  Seward's  noisy  supporters  paraded  the  streets  of  Chicago  with  bands  and 
banners,  shouting,  "If  you  do  not  nominate  Seward,  where  will  you  get  your 
money  ?  " 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  521 

mity  of  the  influential  Horace  Greeley,  of  the  New  York  Trib- 
une, whose  support  was  given  to  Edward  Bates,  a  conserva- 
tive Republican  from  the  border  state  of  Missouri.  Again, 
Seward's  intense  hostility  to  the  "Know-No things"  weakened 
him  in  the  doubtful  state  of  Pennsylvania,  where  the  remnants 
of  that  party  were  still  strong.  And,  most  serious  of  all,  Seward 
had  delivered  a  famous  speech  at  Rochester,  in  October,  1858, 
on  "The  Irrepressible  Conflict,"  in  which  he  had  spoken  of  a 
"higher  law"  than  the  Constitution — a  position  more  radical 
than  Lincoln's  "house  divided  against  itself." 

Seward  led,  however,  on  the  first  ballot,  with  173^  votes  to 
102  for  Lincoln,  50^  for  Cameron  of  Pennsylvania,  49  for 
Governor  Chase  of  Ohio,  48  for  Bates  of  Missouri,  and  42  scat- 
tering. On  the  next  ballot  Seward  had  184^  to  181  for  Lincoln. 
Judge  David  Davis  of  Illinois,  Lincoln's  manager,  was  busy 
winning  delegates  from  Indiana^  Ohio,  and  Pennsylvania,  prom- 
ising cabinet  positions  without  the  sanction  of  Lincoln,  and 
even  against  his  direct  instructions  to  make  no  pledges  or 
promises.  On  the  third  ballot  Lincoln's  vote  reached  23 1^, 
only  i  ^  short  of  the  majority  necessary  for  a  choice;  and  when 
Cartter  of  Ohio  announced  the  transfer  of  four  votes  from 
Chase  to  Lincoln,  the  nomination  was  made  unanimous.  Pande- 
monium reigned  in  the  Wigwam  and  outside.  Men  hugged  one 
another  and  wept  for  joy.  The  streets  were  filled  with  proces- 
sions of  hilarious  men  shouting  themselves  hoarse  for  "Honest 
Abe."  Seward's  chagrin  was  deep.  "I  am  a  leader,"  he  wrote 
to  his  wife,  "deposed  ...  in  the  hour  of  organization  for  de- 
cisive battle."  But  in  spite  of  his  disappointment  he  rallied 
nobly  to  Lincoln's  support. 

The  platform  denied  "the  authority  of  Congress,  of  a  ter- 
ritorial legislature,  or  of  an  individual  to  give  legal  existence 
to  slavery  in  any  territory  of  the  United  States,"1  called  for  the 

1This  was  a  repudiation  of  the  Dred  Scott  decision,  and  a  departure  as 
radical  as  the  South's — but  in  a  diametrically  opposite  direction — from  the 
principles  of  1820  and  1850,  when  Congress,  with  the  support  of  the  North,  had 
sanctioned  slavery  in  the  Louisiana  Purchase  territory  south  of  36°  30'  and  in 
the  Mexican  cession. 


522  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

definitive  suppression  of  the  African  slave  trade,  the  admission 
of  Kansas  as  a  free  state,  the  construction  of  a  Pacific  railroad, 
the  passage  of  a  homestead  bill,  the  appropriation  of  national 
aid  for  river  and  harbor  improvements,  and  the  enactment  of 
a  protective  tariff  to  encourage  home  manufactures.  For  all 
this  variety  of  recommendation,  the  campaign  was  waged  on 
a  single  issue.  The  question  referred  to  the  voters  was,  Is 
slavery  right  and  to  be  extended,  or  is  it  wrong  and  to  be 
checked?  Yancey  and  Lincoln  agreed  in  the  statement  of 
the  dilemma. 

When  the  state  elections  in  Pennsylvania  and  Indiana  went 
Republican  in  October,  Lincoln's  success  seemed  assured.  Doug- 
las, on  hearing  of  the  results,  immediately  started  South  to 
labor  for  the  preservation  of  the  Union.  He  spoke  to  large 
audiences  in  Missouri,  Kentucky,  Tennessee,  Alabama,  Georgia, 
and  Virginia.  To  the  question  whether  Lincoln's  election  would 
justify  secession  he  returned  an  emphatic  No !  to  the  question 
whether  the  president  would  be  justified  in  using  force  to  pre- 
serve the  Union  he  returned  an  equally  emphatic  Yes!  He 
would  "put  the  hemp  around  the  neck  of  the  first  man  who 
raised  the  arm  of  resistance  to  the  constituted  authorities  of 
the  country."  But  Douglas's  action,  however  complimentary 
to  his  patriotism  and  courage,  had  as  little  effect  on  the  rising 
tide  of  disunion  as  did  King  Canute's  command  to  the  waves. 
The  legislature  of  South  Carolina,  which  had  convened  on 
November  5  to  cast  the  electoral  vote  of  the  state,  decided,  on 
the  advice  of  Governor  Gist,  to  remain  in  session  until  the  re- 
sults of  the  election  should  be  known1  and  to  prepare  the  state 
for  any  emergency  "in  view  of  the  probability  of  the  election 
of  a  sectional  candidate  by  a  party  .  .  .  hostile  to  our  institu- 
tions and  fatally  bent  upon  our  ruin."  How  Lincoln  carried 
the  election  of  November  6  will  appear  from  a  study  of  the 
map  following  page  519.  The  student  should  note  the  following 
facts:  (i)  Lincoln's  popular  vote  was  but  40  per  cent  of  the 

1  South  Carolina  was  the  only  state  that  still  retained,  in  1860,  the  early 
method  of  choosing  the  presidential  electors  by  its  legislature.  This  custom  was 
abolished  after  the  war. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  523 

whole;  (2)  Douglas,  though  he  carried  only  one  state  and  part 
of  another,  rolled  up  immense  minorities  in  all  the  states  of 
the  North;  (3)  Breckinridge,  the  disunionist  candidate,  re- 
ceived but  44.7  per  cent  of  the  vote  of  the  Southern  states. 
The  Democrats  secured  control  of  both  Houses  of  Congress  by 
rather  narrow  majorities  (8  in  the  Senate  and  21  in  the  House). 
These  figures  could  not  be  interpreted  as  a  mandate  from 
the  Southern  people  to  dissolve  the  Union,  yet  South  Carolina 
proceeded  immediately  to  the  work.  Four  days  after  Lincoln's 
election  her  legislature  called  for  a  convention  of  the  state  to 
meet  on  December  17  at  Charleston.  On  the  twentieth  this 
convention,  by  a  unanimous  vote  of  its  169  members,  passed 
the  famous  Ordinance  of  Secession,  declaring  that  the  act  of  the 
convention  of  May  23,  1788,  "whereby  the  Constitution  of 
the  United  States  was  ratified  .  .  .  [is]  hereby  repealed,  and 
the  union  now  subsisting  between  South  Carolina  and  the  other 
states  under  the  name  of  the  United  States  of  America,  is  hereby 
dissolved."  On  the  same  evening,  in  a  ceremony  of  high  re- 
joicing attended  by  the  officials  of  the  state  and  distinguished  by 
all  the  beauty  and  chivalry  of  the  capital  city  of  the  South,  the 
delegates  set  their  names  to  the  fateful  ordinance.1  Following 
the  example  of  the  men  of  1776,  whom  they  believed  they  were 
imitating,  the  South  Carolinians  published  a  list  of  grievances 
with  their  "Declaration  of  Independence."  If  anyone  is  tempted 
by  the  postbellum  interpretations  of  Alexander  H.  Stephens, 
Jefferson  Davis,  and  others  to  believe  that  it  was  for  the  vindi- 
cation of  the  theoretical  doctrine  of  states'  rights  or  the  threat- 
ened privilege  of  self-government  that  the  South  seceded,  he 
should  read  this  manifesto  of  the  convention  of  South  Carolina. 
Every  grievance  mentioned  in  it  is  directed  against  the  antislav- 
ery  propaganda :  the  Personal-Liberty  Acts,  the  formation  of 
abolitionist  societies,  the  condemnation  of  slaveholding  as  sinful, 
the  encouragement  to  fugitive  slaves,  the  recognition  of  negroes 
as  citizens,  the  election  of  a  president  who  declared  that  the 

1The  ceremony  took  place  in  Institute  Hall,  the  same  room  where,  eight 
months  before,  the  Southern  delegates,  led  by  Yancey,  had  marched  out  of  the 
Democratic  convention.  The  first  scene  was  the  prelude  to  the  second. 


524  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

nation  could  not  endure  half  slave  and  half  free.  "All  hope  of 
remedy  is  rendered  vain,"  it  concluded,  "by  the  fact  that  the 
public  opinion  at  the  North  has  invested  a  great  political  error 
with  the  sanction  of  a  more  erroneous  religious  belief."1 

Meanwhile  the  timid,  vacillating  Buchanan  was  floundering 
in  a  sea  of  indecision.  The  situation  which  confronted  him 
when  Congress  met  on  the  third  of  December  was  one  of  grave 
peril.  Major  Robert  Anderson,  with  a  garrison  of  only  64  men 
and  with  insufficient  supplies  of  food  and  munitions,  was  sta- 
tioned at  Fort  Moultrie  in  Charleston  harbor,  exposed  to  the 
attack  of  a  hostile  and  rapidly  arming  community.  No  man 
doubted  that  the  convention  about  to  meet  in  a  fortnight  would 
declare  the  secession  of  South  Carolina  from  the  Union.  The 
President's  plain  duty  by  his  oath  of  office  was  to  defend  the 
authority  of  the  United  States.  He  should  immediately  and  at 
any  cost  have  sent  food  and  reinforcements  to  Anderson  and, 
declared  in  unequivocal  terms,  like  Jackson's  in  1832,  his  de- 
termination to  collect  the  revenues  and  enforce  the  laws  in 
every  part  of  the  Union.  He  had  in  his  hands  an  able  paper 
written  by  his  Attorney-General,  Jeremiah  S.  Black,  defining 
his  legal  competency  in  these  measures.  But  Buchanan,  while 
feebly  wishing  to  do  his  duty,  was  surrounded  by  counselors 
who  boasted  of  "tying  his  hands."  Three  of  the  members  of 
his  cabinet  (Cobb,  Floyd,  and  Thompson)  were  secessionists 
at  heart.  Trescot  of  South  Carolina,  the  Assistant  Secretary 
of  State,  was  assuming  to  direct  negotiations  between  the  Presi- 

*It  is  true  that  R.  B.  Rhett  of  South  Carolina  on  the  same  day  published 
an  address  to  the  people  of  the  slaveholding  states  in  which  he  emphasized  the 
tariff  as  the  South's  grievance.  But  this  plea  was  disingenuous.  Every  member 
of  the  South  Carolina  delegation  in  the  House  had  voted  for  the  tariff  bill  of 
1857,  which  was  in  fact  the  lowest  in  our  history.  Rhett  himself  confessed  that  the 
complaint  relative  to  the  tariff  would  be  a  better  cause  for  secession  to  present 
to  the  European  nations  than  a  protest  against  the  Personal-Liberty  Acts.  How 
well  his  clever  ruse  succeeded  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  when  W.  E.  Forster 
said  in  the  House  of  Commons,  in  1862,  that  he  presumed  there  was  no  question 
that  slavery  was  the  cause  of  the  war,  he  was  interrupted  with  cries  of  "No,  no, 
the  tariff ! "  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  provisional  Confederate  government  at 
Montgomery  continued  the  tariff  of  1857  in  force. 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  525 

dent  and  Governor  Gist  of  South  Carolina.  The  advice  of 
Winfield  Scott,  the  general  of  the  army,  and  the  plea  of  Ander- 
son from  Fort  Moultrie  for  a  policy  of  reenforcement  were 
ignored.  Buchanan  sent  a  "Constitutional  essay"  to  Congress 
on  December  4,  instead  of  a  ringing  declaration  of  purpose. 
The  upshot  of  the  pitiable  message  was,  in  the  witty  comment 
of  Seward,  that  "it  is  the  duty  of  the  President  to  execute  the 
laws — unless  somebody  opposes  him ;  and  that  no  state  has  a 
right  to  go  out  of  the  Union — unless  it  wants  to."  Buchanan 
declared  that  the  states  must  obey  the  laws  of  the  Union — and 
added  that  he  had  no  power  to  coerce  them  to  do  so.  When 
the  representatives  from  South  Carolina  in  the  House  visited 
him  a  few  days  later,  he  promised  them  that  he  would  not 
disturb  the  status  quo  in  the  forts  in  Charleston  harbor  so  long 
as  they  were  not  attacked.  Under  this  "truce,"  inaction  con- 
tinued week  after  week  at  Washington,  while  disunion  sentiment 
at  the  South  gained  strength.1 

During  this  critical  month  of  December,  Congress,  to  whose 
shoulders  Buchanan  would  willingly  have  shifted  the  responsi- 
bility of  the  executive,  was  busy  with  plans  for  the  reconciliation 
of  the  sections.  An  able  committee  of  thirteen  was  appointed 
in  the  Senate,  including  Davis,  Douglas,  Wade,  and  Seward. 
The  venerable  J.  J.  Crittenden  of  Kentucky,  the  successor  of 
Henry  Clay,  presented  a  scheme  of  compromise  consisting  of 
six  unamendable  amendments  to  the  Constitution  and  four 
resolutions.  The  proposed  amendments,  besides  protecting 
slavery  in  the  states  where  it  was  legal,  sanctioning  the  domestic 
slave  trade,  and  guaranteeing  payment  by  the  United  States 
government  for  escaped  slaves,  revived  the  36°  30'  line  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise  and  forbade  the  interference  by  Congress 

alt  would  be  hard  to  overrate  the  encouragement  given  to  secession  in  other 
states  than  South  Carolina  by  Buchanan's  pusillanimous  course.  We  have  seen 
by  the  election  figures  that  there  was  a  considerable  amount  of  Unionist  senti- 
ment in  the  South  in  November.  By  the  end  of  the  year  it  had  practically  dis- 
appeared. Yancey,  in  urging  his  state  of  Alabama  to  secede,  could  say:  "I 
believe  that  there  will  not  be  power  to  direct  a  gun  against  a  sovereign  state. 
Certainly  there  will  be  no  will  to  do  so  during  the  present  administration." 


526  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

with  slavery  south  of  that  line.  The  resolutions  called  for  the 
faithful  execution  of  the  Fugitive-Slave  Law,  the  repeal  of  the 
Personal-Liberty  Acts,  and  the  enforcement  of  the  laws  against 
the  African  slave  trade.  The  committee  met  on  December  2 1 , 
the  day  that  the  news  of  the  secession  of  South  Carolina  reached 
Washington.  Throughout  the  North  there  was  a  lively  hope 
that  the  Crittenden  Compromise  might  be  adopted,  especially 
in  the  financial  and  commercial  circles,  where  there  was  much 
anxiety  for  the  safety  of  large  sums  of  money  invested  in  the 
South.  It  is  fairly  certain  that  if  a  popular  referendum  had  been 
taken  on  the  Compromise  it  would  have  been  adopted.  But  the 
committee  could  not  agree.  Davis  voted  with  Seward  against 
the  restoration  of  the  36°  30'  line.  The  Republican  members, 
supported  by  Lincoln,  who  wrote  "Entertain  no  proposition 
for  a  compromise  in  regard  to  the  extension  of  slavery,"  voted 
steadily  in  the  negative.  Their  furthest  concession  was  that 
slavery  should  not  be  disturbed  in  the  slave  states.  On  Decem- 
ber 31  the  committee  reported  that  it  had  not  been  able  to  agree 
on  any  general  plan  of  adjustment.  A  committee  of  thirty- three 
in  the  House  met  with  no  better  success.  Its  only  fruit  was  the 
recommendation  of  a  constitutional  amendment  making  slavery 
inviolable  in  the  states  where  it  was  established  by  law.  The 
amendment  passed  both  Houses  by  the  necessary  two-thirds 
vote,  but  only  two  states  took  pains  to  ratify  it. 

Major  Anderson,  exercising  the  discretion  given  to  him  by 
verbal  orders  from  the  War  Office,  had  spiked  the  guns  of  Fort 
Moultrie  on  the  day  after  Christmas  and  moved  his  little  garri- 
son to  the  safer  walls  of  Fort  Sumter.  The  South  Carolinians 
regarded  this  act  as  a  breach  of  Buchanan's  pledge  not  to  dis- 
turb the  situation  in  Charleston  harbor,  and  three  commis- 
sioners from  the  "sovereign  state,"  who  were  in  Washington  to 
treat  with  the  United  States  government  "for  the  apportionment 
of  the  public  debt  and  the  possession  of  the  forts  and  other 
property  of  the  United  States  within  the  state,"  called  on  the 
President  in  peremptory  terms  to  order  the  return  of  Anderson 
to  Fort  Moultrie.  The  bewildered  Buchanan  seemed  about  to 
yield  to  their  demand  when  the  Unionists  of  his  cabinet,  led  by 


THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF  527 

Secretary  of  State  Black,1  virtually  took  control  of  affairs  and 
compelled  the  President  to  uphold  Anderson.  "I  cannot  and  I 
will  not"  was  the  new  language  in  which  he  replied  to  the  re- 
quest of  South  Carolina  that  he  withdraw  the  troops  from 
Charleston  harbor.  It  gave  the  North  cause  for  rejoicing  at 
the  beginning  of  the  new  year. 

Buchanan's  supineness  and  the  failure  of  Congress  to  reach 
any  agreement  gave  strength  to  the  secession  movement,  which 
moved  rapidly  with  the  opening  of  the  new  year.  Between 
January  i  and  February  i,  1861,  conventions  in  the  states  of 
Mississippi,  Florida,  Alabama,  Georgia,  Louisiana,  and  Texas, 
in  the  order  named,  passed  ordinances  of  secession,  generally 
by  large  majorities.  Only  in  Alabama  and  Georgia  was  there 
a  decided  opposition  to  overcome,  led  in  the  latter  state  by 
Alexander  H.  Stephens,  who  had  "not  lost  hopes  of  securing 
[our]  rights  in  the  Union,"  and  was  opposed  to  secession  "as 
a  remedy  for  anticipated  aggression  on  the  part  of  the  Federal 
Executive  or  Congress."2  Texas  was  the  only  state  in  which 
the  convention  submitted  the  secession  ordinance  to  the  people 
for  a  referendum;  and  the  figures  of  the  popular  vote  (37,794 
to  11,235),  contrasted  with  the  vote  in  the  convention  (166  to 
7)  and  with  the  large  popular  vote  cast  for  the  Unionist  candi- 
dates Bell  and  Douglas  in  the  November  election,  tempt  one  to 
speculate  on  the  truth  of  the  frequent  statement  that  the  people 
of  the  South  were  far  ahead  of  their  leaders  in  the  desire  for 
independence.3  '  % 

1Cass  had  resigned  on  December  15,  and  Black  had  been  moved  up  to  his 
place.  Edwin  M.  Stanton  had  succeeded  to  the  Attorney- Generalship.  Cobb 
had  left  his  department  of  the  Treasury  December  8.  Floyd  had  been  forced  to 
resign  on  account  of  crooked  financial  dealings,  on  December  29.  Thompson 
remained  in  the  cabinet  until  January  7. 

2 Stephens  might  well  speak  so,  for  he  had  a  letter  from  his  friend  President- 
elect Lincoln,  written  December  23,  1860,  assuring  him  that  the  Southern  states 
need  have  no  fear  that  the  incoming  administration  would  disturb  slavery  within 
their  limits.  Stephens  should  have  made  the  letter  public. 

3 Rhodes  (Vol.  Ill,  pp.  276-279)  collects  a  number  of  citations  to  show  that 
the  politicians  of  the  South  were  far  behind  the  people  in  secessionist  sentiment. 
So  many  instances  can  be  cited  on  both  sides  of  such  a  question,  however,  that  it 
is  impossible  to  be  sure  of  one's  conclusions.  Rhodes  feels  "an  additional  con- 


528  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  adoption  of  the  Crittenden  Compromise  by  Congress  or 
of  a  Jacksonian  policy  in  the  White  House1  might  have  halted 
secession  at  the  borders  of  South  Carolina,  though  it  is  doubt- 
ful whether  more  than  a  brief  postponement  of  the  ultimate  ap- 
peal to  arms  could  have  been  accomplished.  The  difference 
between  the  sections  was  beyond  any  device  of  constitutional 
machinery  to  compose.  There  could  be  no  enduring  peace  in  our 
land  until  slavery  was  banished.  Lincoln  was  right  about  "the 
house  divided."  Two  civilizations  confronted  each  other  across 
Mason  and  Dixon's  line,  each  convinced  that  it  stood  for  the  wel- 
fare of  man  and  enjoyed  the  blessing  of  God ;  each  convinced 
that  the  other  was  aggressive,  faithless,  and  accursed.  They  no 
longer  understood  each  other's  language.  Words  like  "honor," 
"right,"  "freedom,"  "citizen,"  meant  different  things  to  each 
section.  The  South  as*ked  the  North  to  call  an  institution  right 
which  the  North  believed  to  be  wrong.  The  North  seemed  to 
cast  a  stigma  on  the  highest  society  of  the  South  by  regarding 
slavery  as  a  blot  on  civilization  and  the  slaveholder  as  a  delib- 
erate sinner.  The  South  accused  the  North  of  being  sectional 
and  at  the  same  time  demanded  that  it  should  mind  its  own  busi- 
ness and  cease  to  "meddle"  with  an  institution  which  the  North 
looked  on  as  a  national  disgrace.  Inconsistency,  misunder- 
standing, and  passion  ruled.  "It  would  not  be  enough  to  please 
the  Southern  states,"  wrote  James  Russell  Lowell  in  the  Atlantic 
Monthly  of  January,  1861,  "that  we  should  stop  asking  them 
to  abolish  slavery;  what  they  demand  of  us  is  nothing  less 
than  that  we  should  abolish  the  spirit  of  the  age." 

fidence "  in  his  statements  "  for  the  reason  that  the  careful  historians  Von  Hoist 
and  Schouler  have  come  to  the  same  conclusion"  (p.  279,  note).  But  these  are 
just  the  two  historians  who  would  emphasize  most  the  testimony  to  Southern 
disunionism. 

1  General  Scott  quotes  from  Southern  papers  the  admission  that  there  would 
have  been  no  Southern  Confederacy  if  his  advice  to  strengthen  the  forts  had 
been  followed  (Memoirs,  p.  616).  But  the  opinion  of  a  few  Southern  editors 
was  neither  infallible  nor  representative. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  CIVIL  WAR 

And  when  the  step  of  Earthquake  shook  the  house, 

Wrenching  the  rafters  from  their  ancient  hold, 

He  held  the  ridgepole  up,  and  spiked  again 

The  rafters  of  the  home.  Eowm  MARZHAM 

THE  RESORT  TO  ARMS 

In  spite  of  the  critical  situation  in  Charleston  harbor  and  the 
perplexity  of  the  administration  at  Washington ;  in  spite  of  the 
failure  of  the  congressional  committees  to  agree  on  a  plan  of 
conciliation ;  in  spite  of  the  rapid  secession  of  the  cotton  states 
in  January  and  the  formation  of  a  Southern  Confederacy  at 
Montgomery,  Alabama,  on  the  fourth  of  February,  1861 ;  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  the  Star  of  the  West,  a  merchant  vessel 
carrying  provisions  from  New  York  to  Fort  Sumter  and  flying 
the  American  flag  at  her  masthead,  had  been  fired  upon  and 
turned  back  by  the  batteries  of  Charleston  harbor, — the  great 
majority  of  the  citizens  of  both  sections  refused  to  believe  that 
the  gates  of  the  temple  of  Janus  were  really  to  be  thrown  open. 

War  was  a  horrid  thought.  The  country  was  prosperous,  and 
a  hundred  projects  of  industrial  enterprise  and  social  reform 
were  stirring  in  the  American  mind.  However  severe  the  tempo- 
rary setback  of  the  panic  of  1857,  there  was  no  effect  of  it  visible 
in  1860.  Our  population  during  the  decade  had  increased  from 
23,191,876  to  31,443,322 — a  gain  of  35.59  per  cent.  The  in- 
crease in  the  city  population  was  78.62  per  cent.  The  farm,  to  be 
sure,  still  maintained  its  lead  over  the  factory  in  1860,  when  our 
agricultural  products  were  valued  at  $1,913,000,000  (as  much 
as  farm  products  and  manufactures  combined  in  1850),  with 
manufactures  running  a  very  close  second  at  $1,885,862,000. 
The  output  of  woolen  goods  had  jumped  from  $48,600,000  to 

529 


530  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

$73,400,000  and  of  cotton  from  $65,500,000  to  $115,600,000  in 
the  ten  years.  In  1850  iron  rails  to  the  value  of  $25,000  were 
manufactured;  in  1860  this  had  increased  to  $105,000.  The 
tonnage  on  the  Great  Lakes  had  grown  from  215,787  to 
611,398;  the  railroad  mileage,  from  9021  to  30,635.  There 
were  50,000  miles  of  telegraph  wires  and  186,000  miles  of  post- 
roads.  Over  2,500,000  immigrants  had  come  to  America  dur- 
ing the  decade.  The  6  per  cent  government  securities  were 
selling  at  a  premium  of  17  points.  In  the  summer  of  1858  a 
cable  had  been  laid  on  the  bed  of  the  Atlantic  from  Newfound- 
land to  the  British  Isles,  and  a  message  of  greeting  had  been 
exchanged  between  Queen  Victoria  and  President  Buchanan. 
The  same  year  the  "pony  express"  carried  mail  from  the 
Missouri  River  to  the  Pacific  coast  in  ten  days,  arousing  re- 
newed interest  in  a  transcontinental  railroad.  Conventions  were 
meeting  to  discuss  women's  rights,  prison  reform,  temperance, 
free  religion,  and  a  host  of  other  topics.  The  intellectual  fer- 
ment out  of  which  these  various  movements  came  was  stimu- 
lated by  a  rich  literature  of  idealism  from  Emerson,  Lowell, 
Holmes,  Whittier,  Longfellow,  Hawthorne,  Curtis,  Simms — the 
great  essayists,  historians,  and  poets  whose  names  are  the  glory 
of  American  letters. 

The  people  of  the  North  and  the  border  slave  states  were 
loath  to  accept  the  deadlock  in  the  committees  of  conciliation. 
Petitions  poured  in  upon  Congress  for  the  reconsideration  of 
the  Crittenden  amendments.  Public  men  in  high  station  and 
influential  newspapers  declared  their  belief  that  an  overwhelm- 
ing majority  of  the  country  was  in  favor  of  their  adoption.  Let 
them  be  submitted  to  a  plebiscite.  The  people  with  a  mighty 
voice  would  decree  peace  where  the  legislators  had  failed.  On 
the  same  day  that  the  delegates  from  the  seceding  states  met  at 
Montgomery  to  form  a  Southern  Confederacy,  a  peace  conven- 
tion was  opened  at  Washington  with  the  venerable  ex-President 
Tyler  in  the  chair.  Over  1 50  delegates,  representing  2 1  of  the 
33  states  of  the  Union,  labored  for  a  month,  with  diminishing 
harmony,  to  devise  an  acceptable  plan  of  compromise — "a 
Convention  of  Notables,"  as  Lowell  sneeringly  called  it,  "to 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  531 

thresh  the  straw  of  debate  anew — the  usual  panacea  of  pala- 
ver." In  the  morning  of  March  4,  a  few  hours  before  the  end 
of  the  Thirty-sixth  Congress,  the  proposals  of  the  convention 
(not  differing  essentially  from  the  Crittenden  Compromise) 
were  submitted  to  the  Senate  and  received  seven  affirmative 
votes.  The  convention,  like  the  committees,  went  its  way  "to 
a  place  in  the  great  company  of  historic  futilities."  The  only 
mouse  that  this  mountain  of  conciliatory  labor  brought  forth 
was  a  proposed  thirteenth  amendment  to  the  Constitution, 
forbidding  Congress  to  abolish  or  interfere  with  slavery  in  any 
state  where  it  was  established  by  law. 

Material  motives  were  mixed  with  nobler  anxieties  for  peace. 
It  was  estimated  that  $200,000,000  were  owed  by  the  Southern 
planters  to  Northern  merchants  and  bankers.  There  was  a 
movement  of  indignant  irritability  in  financial  and  business 
circles  that  this  persistent  specter  of  slavery  should  rise  like 
Banquo's  ghost  to  cast  its  chilling  presence  over  the  scene.  To 
use  Benton's  simile  of  thirty  years  before,  it  was  like  the 
Egyptian  plague  of  frogs,  infesting  every  nook  and  corner  of  our 
life.  Robert  C.  Winthrop,  a  prominent  " cotton  Whig"  of  Mas- 
sachusetts, expressed  the  sentiment  of  his  class  in  the  North 
when  he  deplored  "the  intemperate  antislavery  agitation"  as 
"the  source  of  a  very  large  part  of  the  troubles  with  which  the 
country  had  been  disturbed." 

The  determination  of  the  aristocratic  mercantile  interests  in 
the  cities  of  the  East  not  to  let  slavery  interfere  with  business 
is  strikingly  illustrated  by  the  case  of  New  York.  The  South- 
ern press  besought  the  city  not  to  "sacrifice  her  commerce, 
her  wealth,  her  population,  her  character,"  by  warring  on  her 
"Southern  friends  and  best  customers  ...  at  the  bidding  of 
Black  Republican  tyrants."  When  a  newspaper  editor  from 
Georgia  visited  New  York  to  make  up  the  list  of  merchants 
whom  the  South  should  boycott  or  patronize  according  to  their 
sympathies  with  slavery,  he  was  flatteringly  received  by  scores 
of  prominent  business  men  "who  sought  a  place  on  the  white 
list."  Fernando  Wood,  the  mayor,  suggested  in  his  message 
of  January  7  that  if  disunion  came,  the  city  should  declare 


532  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

its  independence  and  preserve  its  trade.  According  to  John 
Forsythe  of  Alabama,  one  of  the  three  commissioners  whom  the 
new  Confederate  government  at  Montgomery  had  sent  North 
to  "treat"  with  the  United  States,  "200  of  the  most  wealthy  and 
influential  citizens  of  New  York  had  been  approached,  and  were 
then  arranging  the  details  of  a  plan  to  throw  off  the  authority 
of  the  Federal  and  State  governments,  to  seize  the  navy  yard  at 
Brooklyn,  the  vessels  of  war,  and  the  forts  in  the  harbor,  and  to 
declare  New  York  a  '  free  city.' "  Russell  of  the  London  Times, 
visiting  New  'York  and  dining  with  Seymour,  Tilden,  and  Ban- 
croft, said  that  their  conversation  and  arguments  left  on  his 
mind  the  impression  "that  according  to  the  Constitution  the 
government  could  not  use  force  to  prevent  secession  or  to  com- 
pel states  which  had  seceded  by  the  will  of  their  people  to 
acknowledge  the  Federal  power."1 

The  pacifism  of  the  idealist,  the  merchant,  and  the  constitu- 
tionalist was  reenforced  by  the  views  of  the  men  who  thought 
that  the  South  was  not  worth  fighting  for  and  that  a  Union  held 
together  by  force  was  not  worth  living  in.  The  Garrisonian 
abolitionists  were  quite  willing  to  let  the  South  go.  The  Union 
that  was  left  would  be  freed  from  a  great  curse  and  exoner- 
ated from  complicity  in  disgraceful  legislation  like  the  Fugitive 
Slave  laws  and  humiliating  pronouncements  like  the  Dred  Scott 
decision.2  At  least  up  to  the  close  of  1860  men  of  enormous  in- 
fluence spread  abroad  the  doctrine  of  acquiescence  in  peaceable 
secession,  which  their  later  conversion  to  the  policy  of  coercion 
could  not  wholly  undo.  Winfield  Scott,  general  of  the  army, 
was  for  letting  "the  wayward  sisters  depart  in  peace."  Henry 
Ward  Beecher  said,  in  a  speech  in  Brooklyn  on  November  27, 

*New  York  City  had  gone  against  Lincoln  in  the  election  by  over  30,000, 
although  he  had  carried  the  other  great  cities  of  the  country  (Philadelphia,  Chi- 
cago, Boston,  and  even  St.  Louis) . 

2  The  horror  of  war  formed  the  subject  of  Wendell  Phillips's  most  dramatic 
orations.  Whittier,  the  Quaker  poet,  sang : 

"They  break  the  links  of  Union:  shall  we  light 
The  flames  of  Hell  to  weld  anew  the  chain 
On  that  red  anvil  where  each  blow  is  pain  ? " 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  533 

"In  so  far  as  the  free  states  are  concerned,  I  hold  that  it  will  be 
an  advantage  for  the  South  to  go  off."  Horace  Greeley's  edi- 
torials in  the  November  issues  of  the  New  York  Tribune  in- 
sisted that  no  attempt  must  be  made  to  prevent  secession.  "If 
the  cotton  states  shall  decide  that  they  can  do  better  out  of  the 
Union  than  in  it,  we  shall  insist  on  letting  them  go  in  peace. 
We  hope  never  to  live  in  a  republic  where  one  section  is  pinned 
to  the  residue  by  bayonets."  "Five  millions  of  people,  of  whom 
at  least  a  half  a  million  are  able  and  willing  to  shoulder  muskets, 
can  never  be  subdued  while  fighting  around  and  over  their  own 
hearthstones."  This  was  the  language  of  the  Charleston  Mer- 
cury and  the  Richmond  Enquirer  !  Two  days  before  South 
Carolina  seceded  an  article  in  the  Tribune  spoke  of  "the  idle 
gabble  and  monstrous  gassing  about  revolution  and  civil  war." 
It  is  little  wonder,  with  irresolution  in  the  executive,  dead- 
lock in  Congress,  and  confusion  of  counsel  among  the  leaders 
of  public  opinion  in  the  North,  that  the  Southerners,  with  few 
exceptions,  should  have  believed  that  they  would  be  allowed 
peaceably  to  withdraw  from  the  Union.  Jefferson  Davis,  who 
was  one  of  the  first  to  warn  the  Confederacy  that  it  must  expect 
a  long  and  bloody  war,  could  say  as  late  as  January  21,  1861, 
on  taking  pathetic  leave  of  his  colleagues  in  the  Senate,  that 
he  hoped  that  "peaceful  relations  might  continue"  between  the 
two  sections.  The  South  knew  the  North  as  little  as  the  North 
knew  the  South.  Impassioned  public  speakers  and  editors  of 
an  extremely  vituperative  press  had  encouraged  the  belief  that 
a  great  proportion  of  the  .Yankees  were  fanatical  abolitionists 
filled  with  hatred  for  the  South,  hypocritical  money-grabbers, 
and  pharisaical  meddlers,  too  cowardly  to  provoke  a  combat. 
In  1850  the  North  had  been  for  a  compromise  which  allowed 
slavery  to  extend  into  the  territories  of  the  United  States.  But 
the  events  of  the  decade,as  theypassed  in  rapid  succession, — the 
Fugitive-Slave  Act,  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Bill,  the  Lecompton 
fraud,  the  Dred  Scott  decision,  the  Lincoln-Douglas  debates, 
the  John  Brown  raid, — had  nurtured  a  grim  conviction  among 
the  plain  people,  not  fully  sensed  by  the  leaders  on  either  side, 
that  the  test  between  slavery  and  freedom  must  come  soon. 


534  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  surprised  indignation  of  the  South,  when  their  determi- 
nation to  compel  secession  by  the  forcible  seizure  of  Fort  Sumter 
had  crystallized  Northern  sentiment  into  a  practically  unani- 
mous resolve  to  maintain  the  Union  by  arms,  is  well  illustrated 
by  a  letter  from  Mrs.  R.  L.  Hunt  of  New  Orleans  to  her  brother 
Salmon  P.  Chase,  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  in  Lincoln's  cabi- 
net: "Do  not  delude  yourself  or  others  with  the  notion  that 
war  can  maintain  the  Union.  Alas,  I  say  it  with  a  heavy  heart, 
the  Union  is  destroyed ;  it  can  never  be  restored.  If,  indeed, 
the  Federal  Government  had  frowned  on  the  first  dawning  of 
disunion,  things  might  have  been  different.  But  the  United 
States  suffered  South  Carolina  to  secede  without  opposition, 
and  with  scarcely  a  murmur  of  disapprobation.  ...  All  the 
Southern  states,  with  the  exception  of  Kentucky,  Missouri,  and 
Maryland,  have  joined  the  secession,  and  have  formed  them- 
selves in  to.  a  powerful  Confederacy,  with  a  government  pos- 
sessing all  the  usual  powers  of  sovereignties,  exercising  entire 
and  exclusive  sway,  legislative,  executive,  and  judicial,  within 
the  limits  of  those  states  and  dissolving  all  connection  with  the 
United  States.  Having  thus  by  a  revolution  almost  bloodless 
assumed  and  exercised  the  right  of  self-government,  the  Con- 
federate States  are  now  threatened  with  war  and  desolation  if 
they  do  not  abjure  the  government  they  have  formed.  .  .  .  The 
time  has  passed  for  a  discussion  about  the  territories  and  fu- 
gitive slaves  and  the  constitutional  right  of  a  state  to  secede. 
.  .  .  Secession  is  un  fait  accompli.  Disunion  is  a  fixed  fact. 
It  is  worse  than  useless  to  deny  or  attempt  to  evade  this  truth. 
.  .  .  And  how  do  the  statesmen  of  the  North,  how  do  you,  my 
dear  brother,  who  should  recognize  facts  as  they  are,  propose 
to  deal  with  this  question  ?  With  sword  and  buckler,  the  rifle, 
the  bayonet,  .  .  .  and  all  the  dread  instruments  of  war  .  .  .  ? 
With  these  you  propose  to  subjugate  the  entire  free  people  of 
the  South,  while  you  mock  them  with  the  declaration  that  your 
object  is  to  maintain  a  Union  which  no  longer  exists.  .  .  .  You 
may  for  the  moment  have  an  advantage  in  wealth  and  numbers. 
But  ...  the  North  is  fighting  for  subjugation  and  domination, 
the  South  for  liberty  and  independence.  It  is  precisely  like  the 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  535 

great  Revolutionary  struggle  of  '76  against  the  tyranny  of 
Great  Britain.  .  .  .  How  can  you-  expect  victory  in  such  a 
cause  ?  .  .  .  Surely  eight  millions  of  people,  armed  in  the  holy 
cause  of  liberty,  ...  are  invincible  by  any  force  the  North  can 
send  against  them.  .  .  .  Never  were  a  people  more  united  and 
more  determined." 

The  government  which  Mrs.  Hunt,  with  a  rather  premature 
optimism,  speaks  of  as  "exercising  entire  and  exclusive  sway" 
in  the  Confederate  states  was  organized  at  Montgomery,  Feb- 
ruary 4,  1  86  1.  It  adopted  a  constitution  patterned  closely  on 
that  of  the  United  States,  but  characteristically  substituted 
the  phrase  "We,  the  deputies  of  the  Sovereign  and  Independent 
States"  for  "We,  the  people  of  the  United  States."  Although 
itself  the  result  of  the  secession  of  "sovereign  states,"  it  de- 
clared the  new  Confederacy  "permanent."  It  prohibited  pro- 
tective duties  and  the  expenditure  of  public  money  for  internal 
improvements.  It  guaranteed  the  recognition  and  protection 
of  slavery  in  any  new  territory  which  the  Confederacy  might 
acquire,  but,  out  of  deference  to  the  opinion  of  the  civilized 
world,  it  forbade  the  African  slave  trade.  It  provided  for  a 
single  term  of  six  years  for  the  president  and  gave  him  the 
power  to  veto  separate  items  in  appropriation  bills.  The  mem- 
bers of  the  cabinet  were  recognized  on  the  floor  of  Congress. 
Immediately  after  the  constitution  was  framed,  the  provisional 
Congress1  chose  Jefferson  Davis  of  Mississippi  as  president 
and  Alexander  H.  Stephens  of  Georgia  as  vice  president.  They 
made  provision  for  war  by  authorizing  a  military  force  of 
100,000  volunteers  to  serve  a  year  and  a  loan  of  $15,000,000  in 
8  per  cent  bonds,  levying  an  export  tax  of  one  eighth  of  a 


convention  which  made  the  constitution  acted  as  a  provisional  Con- 
gress for  about  a  year.  The  first  regularly  elected  Congress  of  the  Confederacy 
met  on  February  18,  1862.  The  constitution  had  been  ratified  in  the  spring  of 
1861  by  conventions  in  the  seven  seceding  states,  the  total  vote  being  862  to  42. 
Exactly  half  the  negative  votes  came  from  South  Carolina,  where  the  exponents 
of  the  extreme  states'-rights  doctrine  protested  against  the  features  of  "  Southern 
nationalism"  in  the  constitution.  This  vote  was  the  harbinger  of  a  struggle  be- 
tween the  old  Southern  states  of  the  Atlantic  seaboard  and  the  "consolidated" 
Confederate  government  which  lasted  all  through  the  life  of  the  Confederacy. 


536  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

cent  a  pound  on  cotton  to  pay  the  interest  on  the  loan.  They 
turned  over  to  the  president  the  responsibility  for  getting  pos- 
session of  Forts  Sumter  and  Pickens.  They  appointed  three 
commissioners  to  Europe  to  seek  recognition  and  alliances,  and 
three  to  Washington  to  treat  with  their  "late  confederates  of  the 
United  States"  in  relation  to  the  public  property  and  the 
public  debts. 

Meanwhile  Abraham  Lincoln  was  quietly  but  anxiously 
watching  the  progress  of  secession  from  his  home  in  Springfield, 
Illinois.  The  awkward  arrangement  of  our  political  system 
which  allows  four  months  to  intervene  between  the  election  and 
the  inauguration  of  a  president  has  never  had  more  unfortunate 
results.1  While  the  Southern  politicians  were  boasting  of  tying 
Buchanan's  hands  at  Washington,  Lincoln's  hands  were  tied 
at  Springfield.  He  was  still  technically  only  a  private  citizen, 
an  Illinois  lawyer.  He  could  and  did  write  to  individuals,  like 
Gilmer  of  North  Carolina  (whom  he  afterwards  invited  to  fill 
a  cabinet  position)  and  Stephens  of  Georgia  (who  had  been  his 
colleague  in  the  House  in  1847),  that  he  had  no  intention  of 
withholding  official  patronage  from  slaveholders,  that  he  "  would 
be  glad  to  see  any  laws  of  the  states  repealed  which  were  in 
conflict  with  the  national  Fugitive-Slave  Act  of  1850,"  and  that 
his  administration  would  not  interfere  directly  or  indirectly 
with  slavery  in  the  states  where  it  was  established  by  law. 
"The  South  will  be  in  no  more  danger  in  this  respect,"  he  wrote 
Stephens,  "than  it  was  in  the  days  of  Washington."  But,  after 
all,  these  were  only  private  letters,  which  did  nothing  to  allay 
Southern  apprehensions ;  and  Stephens  did  not  see  fit  to  make 
the  correspondence  public.  In  one  matter  only  did  Lincoln 
interfere  during  these  four  months  to  influence  the  counsels  in 
Washington.  On  the  very  day  of  the  secession  of  South  Caro- 

1Of  course,  in  the  original  intent  of  the  Constitution  the  delay  was  for  the 
purpose  of  allowing  the  electors  chosen  in  November  to  meet  and  select  a  presi- 
dent. But  that  procedure  had  ceased,  almost  at  the  beginning  of  our  national 
government,  to  be  anything  but  a  mere  formality.  Even  today  the  awkward  de- 
lay is  virtually  equivalent  to  an  "interregnum,"  which  condemns  the  last  session 
of  the  Congress  of  the  outgoing  administration  to  the  futility  of  marking  time. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  537 

lina,  Thurlow  Weed  called  on  Lincoln  in  Springfield,  as  Senator 
Seward's  representative,  to  seek  the  opinion  of  the  President- 
elect on  the  proposed  plan  for  the  revival  and  extension  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise  line.  Lincoln's  answer  was  unequivocal. 
Slavery  must  not  be  tolerated  in  any  of  the  territory  of  the 
United  States.  On  that  issue  he  was  inexorable.  Seward  ac- 
cepted the  ultimatum,  and  the  Crittenden  Compromise  was 
defeated. 

Lincoln  has  been  severely  criticized  for  this  fateful  decision. 
The  advocates  of  the  Compromise  have  pointed  out  that  the 
election  of  1860  was  by  no  means  a  "mandate"  to  carry  out 
the  Chicago  platform.  For,  although  Lincoln's  electoral  major- 
ity was  large,  the  popular  vote  of  the  country,  by  a  margin  of 
more  than  a  million,  had  been  cast  for  other  candidates — who 
favored  compromise.  It  was  therefore,  say  these  writers,  a 
selfish,  narrow  preference  for  the  maintenance  of  their  party 
to  the  maintenance  of  the  Union  that  actuated  Lincoln  and  his 
followers.  This  is  a  grave  indictment,  if  true.  Its  validity 
lies,  of  course,  in  the  question  of  whether  the  Crittenden  Com- 
promise, if  adopted,  would  have  preserved  the  Union.  Would 
the  determined  South  rest  content  with  the  barren  victory 
which  secured  to  it  only  territories  from  which  slavery  was 
excluded  by  "the  laws  of  nature"?1  Would  the  determined 
North,  even  if  the  Republican  party  should  commit  suicide, 
acquiesce  in  the  very  conditions  which  had  called  the  Repub- 
lican party  into  existence?  Unless  these  questions  can  be 
answered  in  the  affirmative,  Lincoln  was  right  when  he  wrote 
to  Congressman  Kellogg,  "The  tug  has  to  come,  and  better 

1  Lincoln  wrote  to  Weed  (December  17,  1861),  "A  year  will  not  pass  till  we 
shall  have  to  take  Cuba  as  a  condition  on  which  they  will  stay  in  the  Union." 
He  may  have  been  mistaken  ;  yet  Senator  Brown  of  Mississippi  had  said  in  1860: 
"  I  want  Cuba ;  I  want  Tamaulipas,  Potosi,  and  one  or  two  other  Mexican  states ; 
and  I  want  them  all  for  the  same  reason, — for  the  planting  and  spread  of  slavery. 
...  I  would  spread  the  blessings  of  slavery,  like  the  religion  of  our  divine 
Master,  to  the  uttermost  ends  of  the  earth.  ...  I  would  make  the  refusal  to 
acquire  territory  because  it  was  to  be  slave  territory,  a  cause  of  disunion,  just 
as  I  would  make  the  refusal  to  admit  a  new  state,  because  it  was  to  be  a  slave 
state,  a  cause  for  disunion." 


538  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

now  than  later."  The  only  " compromise"  that  either  side 
would  accept  in  1861  was  one  which  appealed  to  the  other  side 
as  an  abject  surrender — a  compromise  of  principles. 

Mr.  Rhodes  thinks  that  the  South  should  have  accepted  the 
terms  which  Lincoln  approved  and  which  Seward  offered  in 
the  Senate  committee  with  the  consensus  of  all  the  Republican 
members ;  namely,  ( i )  an  amendment  to  the  Constitution  for- 
bidding Congress  to  interfere  with  slavery  in  the  states,  (2)  a 
jury  trial  for  fugitive  slaves,  and  (3)  the  recommendation  of 
Congress  to  the  Northern  states  to  repeal  their  Personal  Liberty 
laws.  "Considering  that  the  slavery  question  had  been  sub- 
mitted to  the  people  at  the  presidential  election,  and  that  the 
antislavery  party  had  won,  was  it  not  a  fair  offer?  Did  not 
the  Republicans  meet  the  cotton  states  half  way?  Should  not 
Davis,  Toombs,  and  Hunter  have  agreed  to  the  proposition? 
Could  they  not  have  done  so  without  dishonor?  As  players  in 
the  political  game,  fault  cannot  be  found  with  the  Southerners 
for  making  extreme  demands,  but  when  they  had  ascertained 
the  furthest  concession  the  Republicans  were  willing  to  make, 
ought  they  not  to  have  accepted  it  rather  than  run  the  risk  of 
involving  the  country  in  civil  war?"1  But  it  is  not  difficult  to 
see  why  the  Southerners  would  not  accept  Seward's  proposi- 
tion. For  them  a  purely  sectional  party  had  got  control  of 
the  government, — a  party  whose  members,  in  spite  of  the  dis- 
avowal in  its  platform,  had  condoned  the  behavior  of  John  Brown, 
— a  party  whose  leader  had  predicted  that  the  country  would 
become  all  slave  or  all  free.  With  Abraham  Lincoln  in  office, 
dispensing  the  vast  amount  of  federal  patronage,  controlling 
national  policies  and  diplomatic  negotiations,  commanding  the 
army  and  navy  of  the  United  States,  there  was  little  chance  that 
the  first  clause  of  the  alternative  prophecy  would  come  true. 

1Rhodes,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  177.  Yet  a  few  pages  before  (Vol.  Ill,  p.  149,  note),  com- 
paring the  language  of  a  speech  of  Jefferson  Davis's  in  the  Senate,  December  10, 

1860,  with  that  of  James  Russell  Lowell  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  of  January, 

1861,  Rhodes  shows  how  impossible  compromise  was.    "These  two  quotations 
show,"  he  says,  "as  clearly  as  anything  I  know,  the  underlying  reasons  of  the 
war  between  the  North  and  the  South." 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  539 

It  is  easy  to  discover  inconsistency,  irritability,  and  misrep- 
resentation in  the  Southern  position.  The  Southerners  insisted 
that  they  alone  must  make  the  terms  on  which  they  would  re- 
main in  the  Union.  They  reproached  the  North  for  being  "  sec- 
tional" and  at  the  same  time  told  it  to  mind  its  own  business, 
their  real  grievance,  of  course,  being  that  the  North  was  "na- 
tional" enough  to  feel  a  responsibility  for  the  condition  of  the 
South.  They  resented  the  bitter  attacks  of  a  comparatively  few 
abolitionist  papers  on  their  character  as  slaveholders,  while 
their  own  press,  almost  without  exception,  indulged  in  the  wild- 
est language  of  vituperation  against  the  "Yankees."  Yancey 
and  Breckinridge  might  travel  freely  in  the  North,  presenting 
the  Southern  cause  to  audiences  in  New  York  City,  but  a 
Northerner,  suspected  of  being  tinged  with  abolitionist  prin- 
ciples, was  promptly  persuaded  to  leave  a  Southern  town. 
Calhoun  demanded  that  there  should  be  no  discussion  of  slavery 
in  the  North,  but  he  insisted  upon  slavery's  taking  precedence 
of  every  other  question  in  the  South.  For  this  he  would  muzzle 
the  press,  search  the  mails,  make  the  laws  of  the  states  overbear 
the  federal  statutes,  and  reduce  the  federal  government  to  a 
nullity  which  could  end  only  in  disintegration.  Finally,  though 
they  asserted  that  slavery  was  sanctioned  by  God,1  they  had  no 
confidence  in  its  divine  protection.  For  they  would  tolerate  no 
argument  on  the  subject,  ignoring  the  dictum  of  Macaulay  that 
"men  are  never  so  likely  to  settle  a  question  rightly  as  when 
they  discuss  it  freely."2  But  over  against  all  this  indictment 


xln  a  Thanksgiving  sermon  at  New  Orleans  the  Reverend  B.  M.  Palmer  said: 
"In  this  great  struggle  we  defend  the  cause  of  God  and  religion.  It  is  our  solemn 
duty  to  ourselves,  to  our  slaves,  to  the  world,  and  to  Almighty  God  to  preserve 
and  transmit  our  existing  system  of  domestic  servitude  with  the  right,  unchal- 
lenged by  man,  to  go  and  root  itself  wherever  Providence  and  nature  may  carry  it." 

2  Frederick  Law  Olmsted,  in  his  dispassionate  survey  of  conditions  in  the 
South,  tells  of  asking  a  man  in  official  position  in  Richmond  whether  he  knew 
anything  about  the  reliability  of  certain  figures  in  Professor  Johnson's  "Agri- 
cultural Tour,"  on  the  value  of  slaves  exported  from  Virginia,  and  receiving  the 
reply:  "No,  I  don't  know  anything  about  it.  But  if  they  are  anything  unfavor- 
able to  the  institution  of  slavery,  you  may  be  sure  that  they  are  wrong" 
("Journey  in  the  Seaboard  Slave  States,"  Vol.  I,  p.  61). 


540  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

must  be  set  the  tremendous  fact  that  the  South  was  contending 
for  the  preservation  of  $4,000,000,000  of  slave  property,  for 
the  world's  export  market  in  cotton,  and  for  a  social  system 
which  it  believed  absolutely  necessary  for  the  maintenance  of 
the  civilization,  the  purity,  and  the  safety  of  the  white  race.1 

Lincoln  took  touching  leave  of  his  neighbors  in  Springfield 
on  February  n,  1861.  His  journey  to  Washington,  marked  by 
very  disappointing  speeches  in  various  cities  along  the  route, 
was  uneventful  except  for  rumors  of  assassination  which  reached 
him  at  Philadelphia  and  persuaded  him  to  avoid  passing  through 
the  secessionist  city  of  Baltimore  by  day,  as  he  had  planned. 
He  reached  the  capital  safely  on  the  twenty-third,  and  nine  days 
later  delivered  his  Inaugural  Address  to  an  audience  not  wholly 
free  from  apprehension.2  In  his  first  public  utterance  as  the 
new  head  of  the  nation  Lincoln  pledged  his  administration  to 
the  faithful  execution  of  the  Fugitive-Slave  Law  and  the  non- 
interference with  slavery  in  the  Southern  states.  There  would 
be  no  bloodshed  or  violence  unless  it  should  be  forced  on  the 
national  government.  "In  your  hands,  my  dissatisfied  country- 
men, and  not  in  mine,"  he  said  to  the  South,  "is  the  momentous 
issue  of  civil  war.  The  government  will  not  assail  you.  You 
can  have  no  conflict  without  being  yourselves  the  aggressors. 
You  have  no  oath  registered  in  heaven  to  destroy  the  govern- 
ment, while  I  shall  have  the  most  solemn  one  to  '  preserve,  pro- 
tect, and  defend  it."'  Yet  Lincoln  at  the  same  time  declared 

1  Robert  Toombs  put  the  case  clearly  when  he  said,  "The  question  is  not 
whether  we  could  be  more  prosperous  and  happy  with  these  3,500,000  slaves 
in  Africa  and  their  places  filled  with  an  equal  number  of  hardy,  intelligent,  and 
enterprising  citizens  of  the  superior  race  ;  but  it  is  simply  whether,  while  we 
have  them  among  us,  we  would  be  most  prosperous  with  them  in  freedom  or 
bondage."   To  that  question  there  was  but  one  answer  in  the  South. 

2  All  through  the  winter  there  were  rumors  that  an  attempt  would  be  made  to 
prevent  the  inauguration  of  a  Black  Republican  president.   On  Christmas  Day, 
1860,  the  Richmond  Enquirer  asked,  "Can  there  not  be  found  men  bold  and 
brave  enough  in  Maryland  to  unite  with  the  Virginians  in  seizing  the  Capitol  at 
Washington  ? "    General  Scott  had  about  450  soldiers  of  the  regular  army  in 
Washington  to  insure  the  peaceable  counting  of  the  electoral  vote  on  February  13, 
and  the  force  was  increased  to  650  for  the  inauguration.   Both  events  passed  in 
perfect  quiet. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  541 

that  no  state  could  lawfully  leave  the  Union  "upon  its  own  mere 
motion,"  that  the  ordinances  of  secession  were  void,  that  he 
should  take  care  to  execute  the  laws  of  the  Union  in  all  the 
states,  as  he  was  bound  to  do  by  his  oath  of  office,  and  that  he 
would  use  the  power  confided  to  him  "to  hold,  occupy,  and 
possess  the  property  and  places  belonging  to  the  Government." 
The  sinister  import  of  these  warnings  could  not  be  hidden  by 
the  beautiful  sentiment  of  the  closing  sentence  of  the  Inau- 
gural: "The  mystic  chords  of  memory,  stretching  from  every 
battlefield  and  patriot  grave  to  every  living  heart  and  hearth- 
stone all  over  this  broad  land,  will  yet  swell  the  chorus  of  the 
Union,  when  again  touched,  as  surely  they  will  be,  by  the 
better  angels  of  our  nature."  The  South,  regarding  secession 
and  the  Confederacy  as  accomplished  facts,  interpreted  the 
Inaugural  as  a  virtual  declaration  of  war.1 

The  next  day  the  Senate  in  executive  session  ratified  the 
President's  choice  of  a  cabinet.2  It  was  a  composite  body, 
representing  all  shades  of  Unionist  sentiment.  Four  of  its 
members  had  been  Lincoln's  rivals  in  the  Chicago  convention. 
Chase  and  Welles  represented  the  anti-Nebraska  Democracy; 
Cameron  and  Smith  were  rewarded  for  political  services; 
Bates  and  Blair  were  from  the  loyal  slaveholding  states.  The 
two  tasks  which  the  President  saw  immediately  before  him  were 
to  hold  Forts  Sumter  and  Pickens  and  to  keep  the  border  slave 
states  in  the  Union.  The  day  of  the  inauguration  a  report 
reached  the  War  Office  from  Major  Anderson  that  he  had  pro- 
visions for  a  month  and  that  20,000  men  would  be  needed  to 


*A  group  of  secessionists  at  Washington  wrote  to  L.  P.  Walker,  the  Con- 
federate Secretary  of  War,  on  the  day  of  the  Inaugural:  "We  agreed  that  it 
was  Lincoln's  purpose  at  once  to  attempt  the  collection  of  the  revenue,  to  rein- 
force and  hold  Forts  Sumter  and  Pickens,  and  to  retake  the  other  places.  He 
is  a  man  of  will  and  firmness.  His  cabinet  will  yield  to  him  with  alacrity.  .  .  . 
There  are  five  or  six  ships  in  New  York  harbor  all  ready  to  start." 

2Namely :  William  H.  Seward  of  New  York  (State),  Salmon  P.  Chase  of  Ohio 
(Treasury),  Simon  Cameron  of  Pennsylvania  (War), — to  be  replaced  early  in 
1862  by  Edwin  M.  Stanton  of  Ohio,— Edward  Bates  of  Missouri  (Attorney- 
General),  Gideon  Welles  of  Connecticut  (Navy),  Caleb  Smith  of  Indiana  (Inte- 
rior), and  Montgomery  Blair  of  Maryland  (Postmaster-General). 


542  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

hold  Fort  Sumter.  General  Scott  advised  evacuation.  "As  a 
practical  military  question,  the  time  for  succoring  Fort  Sumter 
with  any  means  at  hand,"  he  said,  "had  passed  away."  At  a 
cabinet  meeting  on  March  1 5  Seward,  Cameron,  Welles,  Smith, 
and  Bates  all  agreed  that  it  was  unwise  to  attempt  to  provision 
the  fort.  Seward's  behavior  was  extraordinary.  He  seemed  to 
regard  himself  as  the  guiding  spirit  of  the  administration,  whose 
duty  it  was  to  lead  the  inexperienced  Lincoln  gently  but  firmly 
along  the  path  to  peace.  He  entered  into  negotiations  with  the 
Confederate  "ambassadors"  from  Montgomery  and  gave  them 
secret  assurance  that  the  status  of  Fort  Sumter  would  not 
be  disturbed.  He  declared  with  oracular  optimism  that  the 
South  would  soon  come  back  to  its  allegiance  to  the  Union  with 
a  little  careful  handling :  "The  trouble  will  all  blow  over  within 
ninety  days."  "He  was  vigilantly  attentive,"  says  Welles,  "to 
every  measure  and  movement  in  the  order  departments;  .  .  . 
watched  and  scrutinized  every  appointment  that  was  made; 
.  .  .  but  was  not  communicative  in  regard  to  the  transactions 
of  the  State  Department."  He  tried  to  get  Lincoln  to  omit  the 
general  cabinet  meetings  and  consult  with  the  secretaries  sepa- 
rately as  occasion  arose.  And  finally,  on  April  i,  he  submitted 
to  Lincoln  an  amazing  paper  entitled  "Thoughts  for  the  Presi- 
dent's Consideration."  At  the  end  of  a  month,  he  said,  the 
administration  still  found  itself  without  a  policy  domestic  or 
foreign.  This  indecision  must  not  continue.  Let  Sumter  be 
evacuated  to  appease  the  South,  and  a  vigorous  foreign  policy 
initiated  to  cement  the  Union.  "I  would  demand  explana- 
tions from  France  and  Spain  categorically  and  at  once  .  .  . 
and  if  satisfactory  explanations  were  not  received  .  .  .  would 
convene  Congress  and  declare  war  against  them.  But  what- 
ever policy  we  adopt,  there  must  be  an  energetic  prosecu- 
tion of  it.  ...  Either  the  President  must  do  it  himself  .  .  . 
or  devolve  it  on  some  member  of  his  cabinet.  ...  I  neither 
seek  to  evade  nor  assume  the  responsibility."  Lincoln,  with 
great  forbearance  and  kindness,  set  the  importunate  secre- 
tary right  on  the  question  as  to  who  was  the  head  of  the 
administration. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  543 

The  President  had  already  (and  now  with  the  approval  of  all 
the  cabinet  except  Seward  and  Smith)  decided  to  send  a  relief 
expedition  to  Fort  Sumter  and  fixed  April  6  as  the  date  of  its 
departure.  On  that  day  a  clerk  in  the  State  Department  was 
sent  to  Charleston  to  present  the  following  notification,  written 
in  Lincoln's  own  hand,  to  Governor  Pickens  of  South  Carolina : 
"I  am  directed  by  the  President  of  the  United  States  to  notify 
you  to  expect  that  an  attempt  will  be  made  to  supply  Fort 
Sumter  with  provisions  only;  and  that  if  such  an  attempt  be 
not  resisted,  no  effort  to  throw  in  men,  arms,  or  ammunition  will 
be  made  without  further  notice."  Meanwhile  a  lively  exchange 
of  telegrams  had  been  going  on  between  the  Confederate  govern- 
ment at  Montgomery,  its  commissioners  at  Washington,  Gov- 
ernor Pickens,  and  General  Beauregard,  in  command  of  the 
Confederate  troops  at  Charleston.  Seeing  in  Lincoln's  Inaugu- 
ral the  doom  of  their  hopes  of  peaceful  secession,  the  Confed- 
erates sought  to  gain  delay  for  better  preparations.  The  secret 
instructions  to  the  commissioners  at  Washington  were  to  "play 
with  Seward"  and  to  "delay  and  gain  time  until  the  South  was 
ready."  But  Lincoln's  warning  to  Governor  Pickens  precipi- 
tated action.  The  Northern  papers  referred  to  the  Sumter  re- 
lief expedition  as  "a  force  which  will  overcome  all  opposition." 
The  commissioners  believed  that  Seward  had  deliberately 
deceived  them.  Governor  Pickens  believed  that  Lincoln  was 
hiding  the  purpose  of  armed  coercion  behind  the  pretext  of  pro- 
visioning the  fort.  So  the  cabinet  at  Montgomery,  under  the 
pressure  of  these  representations,  and  in  spite  of  the  remon- 
strances of  the  Secretary  of  State,  Robert  Toombs,  who  warned, 
"It  is  suicide,  murder,  and  will  lose  us  every  friend  at  the 
North,"  instructed  Beauregard  to  demand-  the  surrender  of 
the  fort. 

Major  Anderson  refused  to  surrender.  The  pilots  of  Charles- 
ton harbor  sent  word  to  Beauregard  that  a  United  States  vessel 
had  been  sighted.  Another  embassy  was  sent  to  Anderson  at 
midnight,  and  on  his  second  refusal  to  surrender  he  was  formally 
notified  at  3.20  A.M.  (April  12)  that  the  Confederate  batteries 
would  open  fire  on  the  fort  in  one  hour.  With  the  first  roar 


544  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  the  guns  the  people  of  Charleston  began  to  wake  from  their 
light  sleep  and  flock  to  the  esplanade  which  faced  the  harbor, 
where  they  watched  the  spectacular  duel  between  the  island 
batteries  and  the  fort.  The  prudent  stayed  on  shore,  cheering 
the  shots  that  struck  and  waving  the  Palmetto  flag.  The  more 
venturesome  put  out  into  the  harbor  with  little  apparent  regard 
for  the  range  of  the  guns.  All  day  the  battle  continued,  and  at 
intervals  through  the  night  of  rain  and  wind  that  followed,  the 
Confederate  batteries  kept  up  the  fire.  In  the  morning  the  duel 
was  resumed.  After  maintaining  the  unequal  contest  for  thirty- 
two  hours,  the  fort  in  flames  and  his  flag  shot  down,  his  ex- 
hausted men  tortured  with  the  heat  and  choked  with  smoke, 
Major  Anderson  surrendered  on  the  afternoon  of  Saturday, 
April  13.  On  Sunday  he  marched  out  of  the  fort,  after  saluting 
the  flag,  with  drums  beating  and  colors  flying,  and  embarked 
for  New  York  on  the  Federal  vessels  lying  outside  the  bar.1 

The  assault  on  Fort  Sumter  put  an  end  to  hesitancy  and  con- 
fused counsels.  The  day  after  Anderson's  surrender  Lincoln 
issued  a  proclamation  declaring  that  the  laws  of  the  United 
States  were  obstructed  in  the  seven  states  of  the  secession  by 
"combinations  too  powerful  to  be  suppressed  by  the  ordinary 
course  of  judicial  proceedings  or  by  the  powers  vested  in  the 
marshals  of  the  law,"  and  called  upon  the  governors  of  the  loyal 
states  for  75,000  volunteers  from  their  militia  to  serve  for  three 
months.  None  of  the  governors  of  the  eight  slave  states  which 
had  not  seceded  obeyed  the  President's  call,  but  the  response 
from  the  country  north  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  was  instan- 
taneous and  hearty.  Party  lines  were  obliterated.  The  mal- 
contents swung  into  line.  "That  first  gun  at  Fort  Sumter," 

1The  relief  expedition  which  Lincoln  had  planned  with  Gustavus  V.  Fox, 
Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  was  to  consist  of  the  powerful  warship  Pow- 
hatan  with  three  smaller  vessels,  the  steamer  Baltic,  and  three  tugs  to  take  the 
provisions  into  the  fort.  By  Seward's  officious  meddling,  over  the  heads  of  the 
Navy  Department,  the  Powhatan  was  detached  from  the  expedition  and  sent  to 
Pensacola,  Florida.  The  tugs  all  failed  to  reach  the  scene  of  the  rendezvous  out- 
side Charleston*  harbor.  The  other  vessels,  powerless  to  render  aid  to  Anderson, 
lay  rolling  in  the  heavy  sea  off  the  bar  during  the  entire  bombardment,  waiting 
vainly  for  the  Powhatan  to  arrive. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  545 

wrote  Lowell,  "brought  all  the  free  states  to  their  feet  as  one 
man."  Greeley  was  enthusiastic ;  Fernando  Wood,  addressing 
a  huge  patriotic  mass  meeting  in  Union  Square,  New  York, 
cried,  "I  am  with  you  in  this  contest:  we  know  no  party  now." 
Douglas  hastened  to  pledge  the  support  of  the  Democrats  of  the 
North,  declaring,  "  There  can  be  no  neutral  in  this  war — only 
patriots  or  traitors."  The  ex-presidents,  Pierce  and  Buchanan, 
who  had  been  so  conspicuously  under  the  influence  of  the  South- 
ern statesmen  while  in  the  White  House,  rallied  to  Lincoln's 
support.  "The  North  will  sustain  the  administration  almost  to 
a  man,"  wrote  'Buchanan,  "and  it  ought  to  be  sustained  at  all 
hazards."1  The  actual  outbreak  of  war  and  Lincoln's  call  for 
troops  stimulated  an  equal  enthusiasm  in  the  South.  Volun- 
teers flocked  to  answer  President  Davis's  call  for  100,000  men, 
and  the  Confederate  Congress  met  in  extra  session  to  pass  meas- 
ures for  the  financial,  industrial,  and  military  security  of  the 
Confederacy. 

The  week  following  the  fall  of  Fort  Sumter  was  crowded 
with  events  of  the  greatest  importance.  On  Monday,  April  15, 
Lincoln  issued  his  proclamation.  On  Tuesday  the  militia  of 
Massachusetts,  trained  for  weeks  by  Governor  John  A.  Andrew, 
began  to  muster.  On  Wednesday  the  Sixth  Massachusetts 
regiment  started  for  Washington,  and  the  state  of  Virginia  se- 
ceded. On  Thursday  the  federal  authorities  abandoned  Harpers 
Ferry,  burning  the  armory  and  destroying  most  of  the  arms. 
On  Friday  the  Massachusetts  troops,  marching  from  station  to 
station  through  Baltimore,  were  attacked  by  a  mob,  and  a 
bloody  affray  followed  in  which  four  soldiers  and  several  of  the 
assailants  were  killed — the  first  bloodshed  of  the  Civil  War. 
The  same  day  Lincoln  proclaimed  a  blockade  of  the  Atlantic 
coast  from  South  Carolina  to  Florida.  On  Saturday  Robert  E. 
Lee,  after  a  harrowing  inward  struggle  between  his  love  for  the 
Union  and  his  devotion  to  his  state,  resigned  his  commission  in 
the  United  States  army,  deeming,  in  the  words  of  Alexander  H. 

1The  South  was  surprised  at  the  "desertion"  of  the  men  whom  they  re- 
garded as  their  friends.  See  a  number  of  quotations  from  the  Southern  press 
on  this  subject  in  Rhodes,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  399,  note  3. 


546  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Stephens,  that  his  state  had  "  never  parted  with  her  sovereign 
right  to  demand  the  ultimate  allegiance  of  her  citizens."  He  had 
been  informally  tendered  the  command  of  the  Federal  army, 
but  he  chose  to  accept  his  commission  from  the  governor  of 
Virginia.  Lee  was  the  soul  of  honor — like  Bayard,  a  "  knight 
without  fear  or  reproach."  He  hated  slavery  and  cherished 
the  Union.  That  such  a  man,  and  hundreds  of  gentlemen  like 
him  in  the  South,  should  have  been  compelled  to  make  such  a 
choice  is  a  distressing  proof  of  the  power  of  an  established 
social  order  to  sweep  men  along  in  its  current.1 

The  defection  of  Virginia  from  the  Union  brought  secession 
up  to  the  banks  of  the  Potomac  and  planted  the  Stars  and  Bars 
within  sight  of  the  Capitol.  Washington  was  poorly  defended. 
Officeholders  and  citizens  were  leaving  in  something  of  a  panic, 
and  rumors  were  current  that  Beauregard  was  going  to  use 
his  South  Carolina  troops  for  the  capture  of  the  city.  The 
President  shared  the  anxiety,  pacing  the  floor  of  his  office  in  the 
White  House  and  gazing  down  the  Potomac  in  vain  for  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  boats  which  he  expected  to  bring  reenforce- 
ments  via  Chesapeake  Bay.  By  the  order  of  Mayor  Brown  of 
Baltimore  the  Marylanders  had  destroyed  direct  railroad  con- 
nections and  telegraphic  communication  with  the  North.  Regi- 
ments from  New  York  and  Boston,  coming  by  the  circuitous 


1  As  it  is  unjust  to  call  such  men  as  Lee  "traitors"  for  their  interpretation  of 
their  duty  of  allegiance,  so  it  is  unfair  to  use  their  names  to  cover  the  evil  of 
slavery.  One  sometimes  reads  such  sentences  as,  "The  civilization  which  pro- 
duced a  Robert  E.  Lee  could  not  have  been  altogether  bad."  But  the  de- 
testable institution  of  slavery  no  more  "produced"  Robert  E.  Lee  than  the 
corruptions  of  Imperial  Rome  produced  Marcus  Aurelius.  It  is  true,  in  a 
sense,  that  the  discussion  of  slavery  today  is,  as  Goldwin  Smith  remarked,  "like 
trampling  on  a  grave."  Yet  to  refrain  from  a  discussion  of  slavery  is  to  re- 
nounce writing  the  history  of  the  Civil  War.  Professor  McLaughlin  seems  to 
me  to  have  stated  in  admirable  terms  the  spirit  in  which  such  discussion  should 
be  approached :  "  We  often  find  in  life  gentle  and  refined  people  who  tolerate  a 
system  of  industrial  or  social  intolerance  which  one  would  expect  them  to  reject. 
One  ought  to  be  allowed  to  attack  evils  in  an  industrial  and  social  system  with- 
out being  charged  with  attacking  the  conscience  and  character  of  all  who  are 
caught  up  and  entangled  in  that  system"  ("Steps  in  the  Development  of  Ameri- 
can Democracy,"  p.  139,  note) . 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  547 

way  of  Chesapeake  Bay  and  Annapolis  and  relaying  the  torn-up 
tracks  as  they  advanced,  finally  marched  into  Washington  on 
April  25,  and  the  capital  felt  safe.  There  was  really  little  cause 
for  anxiety.  The  Confederate  government  had  no  intention  of 
marching  troops  across  the  soil  of  the  " sovereign  states"  of 
North  Carolina  and  Virginia.  The  South,  overestimating  the 
forces  at  Washington,  was  thinking  far  more  of  her  own  pro- 
tection than  of  delivering  an  attack  on  the  North.  Richmond 
was  as  much  " panic-stricken"  as  Washington. 

Lincoln  succeeded  better  in  his  hope  to  stem  the  tide  of  se- 
cession than  in  his  determination  to  hold  Fort  Sumter.  To  be 
sure,  Arkansas,  North  Carolina,  and  Tennessee  followed  Vir- 
ginia out  of  the  Union,  but  the  four  other  slaveholding  states — 
Delaware,  Maryland,  Kentucky,  and  Missouri — were  kept  loyal. 
Except  in  Delaware,  where  slaves  were  very  few,  the  task  was 
difficult,  and  it  was  accomplished  largely  through  the  tact- 
ful, conciliatory  patience  of  President  Lincoln.  He  summoned 
Mayor  Brown  to  the  White  House  and  agreed  not  to  send  more 
troops  through  the  excited  city  of  Baltimore  if  their  passage 
via  Perry ville  and  Annapolis  were  not  interfered  with.  When 
the  loyal  Governor  Hicks  convened  the  legislature  at  Frederick 
City,  Lincoln  had  General  Scott  show  enough  force  to  encourage 
the  Unionist  sentiment,  without  giving  the  secessionists  provo- 
cation for  making  a  disturbance.  The  result  was  the  triumph 
of  Union  feeling  in  the  state.  A  solid  loyal  delegation  was 
elected  for  the  extra  session  of  Congress  which  Lincoln  had 
called  for  July  4.  By  the  middle  of  May  the  governor  was 
strong  enough  to  dismiss  the  secessionist  militia  in  Baltimore, 
repair  the  railroad  and  telegraph  communications  with  the 
North,  and  raise  four  regiments  to  fill  the  state's  quota  of  the 
troops  called  for  by  Lincoln's  proclamation.1  Of  course,  thou- 
sands volunteered  for  the  Confederate  ranks.  When  Lee's  army 

1  After  the  defeat  of  the  Union  army  in  the  summer  of  1861,  Secretary  of 
War  Cameron,  fearing  that  Maryland  might  secede,  took  measures  of  repression 
unwarranted  by  the  Constitution.  The  press  was  censored,  and  several  members 
of  the  legislature  were  seized  without  warrants  and  imprisoned  (with  other  sus- 
pects from  Kentucky  and  Missouri)  in  forts  in  New  York  and  Boston  Harbors. 


548  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

launched  its  great  invasion  of  the  North  in  the  Gettysburg 
campaign  of  1863,  the  song  that  went  down  the  swinging  col- 
umn was  "Maryland,  my  Maryland." 

Lincoln's  task  of  keeping  his  native  state  of  Kentucky  in  the 
Union  was  harder.  Governor  Magoffin  had  answered  his  call 
for  troops  with  an  indignant  refusal.  The  legislature  was  de- 
termined that  the  state  should  remain  neutral.  Even  so  loyal  a 
Unionist  as  Crittenden  approved  this  policy,  believing  that  Ken- 
tucky, interposed  as  a  buffer  between  the  two  hostile  sections, 
could  keep  them  from  war.  Though  he  saw  the  folly  of  such 
a  hope,  Lincoln  treated  it  with  consideration.  He  used  three 
able  Kentuckians  to  win  over  the  state.  Major  Anderson  was 
stationed  at  Cincinnati,  just  across  the  Ohio  River,  with  instruc- 
tions to  receive  volunteers  from  Kentucky  and  Virginia.  L.  H. 
Rousseau,  a  state  senator,  was  commissioned  to  raise  a  brigade 
of  Kentuckians  for  the  United  States  army  at  Camp  Joe  Holt, 
on  the  Indiana  side  of  the  river.  A  third  Kentuckian,  William 
Nelson,  a  young  naval  officer,  was  given  leave  of  absence  to  or- 
ganize and  supply  with  arms  the  Unionist  volunteers  in  the 
central  part  of  the  state.  In  spite  of  the  secessionist  influence  of 
Governor  Magoffin,  the  elections  in  May  for  the  extra  session 
of  Congress  resulted  in  the  return  of  nine  Unionist  members  out 
of  a  delegation  of  ten.  The  state  remained  in  the  Union,  but 
the  names  of  Breckinridge,  Buckner,  Hood,  and  Albert  Sidney 
Johnston  are  proof  of  the  strength  which  Kentucky  furnished 
to  the  Confederacy. 

In  Missouri  it  actually  came  to  civil  war.  Francis  P.  Blair, 
Jr.,  of  St.  Louis,  a  strong  Union  man  and  a  brother  of  Lincoln's 
Postmaster-General,  raised  four  regiments  of  "Home  Guards," 
chiefly  from  the  loyal  German  population  of  Missouri,  and  of- 
fered them  to  the  President  as  the  state's  quota  of  militia.  He 
secured  the  appointment  of  Captain  Nathaniel  Lyon  as  their 
commander.  Governor  Jackson,  an  out-and-out  secessionist, 
also  organized  armed  bands,  called  the  "Minute  Men,"  and 
established  Camp  Jackson,  on  the  outskirts  of  the  city,  with 
the  object  of  seizing  the  arsenal.  When  Lyon  discovered  that 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  549 

Jackson  was  receiving  arms  and  ammunition  from  the  Confed- 
erate government  at  Montgomery,  he  attacked  Camp  Jackson, 
drove  the  governor  out,  and,  following  him  up  the  river,  seized 
the  state  capital  of  Jefferson  City  (June  15).  Jackson  and  his 
general,  Sterling  Price,  withdrew  to  the  southern  part  of  the 
state,  along  the  western  slopes  of  the  Ozark  Mountains,  to 
receive  reinforcements  from  the  state  of  Arkansas,  while  a 
convention  assembled  at  the  capital  established  a  Unionist 
government. 

Neither  side  won  a  complete  victory  in  the  border  states. 
Although  the  upper  tier  were  held  officially  in  the  Union,  they 
furnished  hundreds  of  thousands*  of  volunteers  to  the  Confed- 
erate armies ;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  while  Virginia,  North  Car- 
olina, Arkansas,  and  Tennessee  seceded,  large  districts  of  three 
of  these  states  remained  loyal  and  eventually  supplied  some 
200,000  to  the  armies  of  the  North.  In  eastern  Tennessee,  for 
example,  the  vote  on  secession,  on  June  8,  was  14,780  for  and 
32,923  against,  while  the  central  and  western  parts  of  the  state 
voted  in  the  affirmative  by  90,000  to  14,000.  The  forty-eight 
counties  of  Virginia  west  of  the  Alleghenies  cast  about  30,000 
votes  against  secession  in  May,  1861.  When  Governor  Letcher 
sent  troops  across  the  mountains  to  defeat  the  design  of 
these  counties  to  "secede  from  secession,"  General  George  B. 
McClellan,  in  command  of  the  Ohio  militia  on  the  northern 
bank  of  the  river,  sent  aid  to  the  West  Virginia  Unionists.  In 
a  five  weeks'  campaign  (June- July)  McClellan,  with  greatly 
superior  forces,  had  little  trouble  in  clearing  the  Confederate 
troops  out  of  the  counties.1  A  convention  at  Wheeling  had 
chosen  F.  H.  Pierpont  governor  and  established  a  legislature 
embracing  as  a  nucleus  the  forty-six  members  of  the  Virginia 
convention  who  had  voted  against  secession.  This  "  Rump  Par- 
liament" elected  United  States  senators,  who  were  received  and 

1  McClellan 's  West  Virginia  campaign  was  of -slight  military  magnitude,  but 
it  had  the  important  effect  of  cutting  the  main  line  of  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio 
Railroad,  which  ran  across  the  northern  part  of  the  state,  and  of  bringing 
McClellan  into  a  fateful  prominence  as  "the  man  of  the  hour." 


550  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

seated  at  Washington.  Their  new  state,  at  first  called  Kanawha, 
was  formally  admitted  to  the  Union  in  1863  as  West  Virginia. 
McClellan  formed  the  ambitious  plan  of  marching  his  victorious 
army  southward,  "liberating"  the  Unionists  of  the  mountain 
regions  of  Tennessee,  North  Carolina,  and  Georgia  and  attack- 
ing Richmond  (which  had  become  the  Confederate  capital  in 
May)  from  the  rear.  But  his  plan  was  spoiled  by  the  defeat  of 
the  Union  army  in  Virginia,  which  we  shall  relate  presently. 

To  sum  up  the  important  developments  between  the  fall  of 
Fort  Sumter  and  the  midsummer  of  1861 :  Four  new  states  had 
been  added  to  the  Confederacy,  bringing  the  total  population  of 
the  seceded  area  to  8,700,000  as  against  22,700,000  in  the  23 
states  of  the  Union.  As  3,500,000  of  the  population  of  the  South 
were  slaves,  the  real  superiority  of  the  North  in  man  power  was 
about  four  to  one.  In  wealth,  facilities  of  transportation,  variety 
of  industries,  mobility  of  capital,  control  of  commerce,  abun- 
dance of  food  supply, — in  short,  in  every  economic  aspect  (unless 
the  great  volume  of  cotton  exports  could  be  maintained), — the 
North  was  vastly  superior.  To  offset  this  disparity  in  numbers 
and  resources,  the  South  had  some  marked  advantages.  They 
would  fight  a  defensive  war  on  their  own  soil,  for  the  protection 
of  their  homes  and  their  property.  Their  men  were  on  the 
whole  better  material  from  which  to  make  soldiers,  and  the 
Mexican  War  had  been  a  valuable  training-ground  for  many  of 
their  officers.  Their  president  was  a  distinguished  graduate  of 
West  Point,  a  commander  with  experience  in  the  field,  an  ex- 
Secretary  of  War,  and  acquainted  with  the  military  personnel 
of  the  country,  while  Lincoln  was  a  civilian  who  had  to  learn  by 
slow  and  painful  experience  that  minimum  of  tactical  and 
strategic  knowledge  which  he  needed  as  commander  in  chief  of 
the  forces  of  the  United  States.  Furthermore,  the  South,  firm 
in  the  faith  that  "Cotton  is  king,"  looked  confidently  to  Great 
Britain,  whose  queen  had  recognized  the  Confederacy  in  May 
as  a  belligerent  power,  to  break  the  blockade  which  threatened 
famine  to  the  cotton  mills  of  Lancashire.  The  tone  in  the  press 
and  the  Parliament  of  aristocratic  England  left  no  doubt  as  to 


THE  UNITED  STATES 

in  the  period  of 
THE  CIVIL  WAR 

SCALE  OF  MILES 


Dates  indicate  year  of  admission  to  the  Union 


751 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  551 

where  the  sympathies  of  the  governing  classes  of  the  island  lay.1 
Finally,  absolutely  convinced  of  the  righteousness  of  their  cause, 
the  South  entered  the  war  as  a  holy  crusade,  repeating  the  lan- 
guage of  the  men  of  1776  and  resolved  to  defend  their  liberty 
and  independence  to  the  last  man  and  the  last  dollar.2 

So  the  men  of  the  North  and  the  men  of  Dixie  confronted  each 
other  in  arms  in  the  midsummer  of  1861.  The  "  irrepressible 
conflict"  had  come.  Two  systems  of  social  and  economic  life, 
which  had  engendered  two  systems  of  political  theory,  irrecon- 
cilable, reciprocally  contemptuous,  mutually  destructive,  stood 
grimly  determined  to  fight  out  on  the  field  of  battle  the  solu- 
tion which  thirty  years  of  unconvincing  compromise  had  failed 
to  furnish. 

THE  FIELD  OF  BATTLE 

From  the  surrender  of  Major  Anderson  at  Fort  Sumter  in 
April,  1  86  1,  to  the  surrender  of  General  Lee  at  Appomattox  in 
April,  1865,  one  supreme  purpose  guided  the  entire  policy  of 
the  governments  on  both  sides  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line. 
Every  measure  of  diplomacy,  finance,  public  law,  and  economic 
legislation  was  taken  with  a  view  to  the  accomplishment  of  the 
supreme  purpose  —  the  winning  of  the  war.  All  eyes  were  fixed 
on  the  advance  and  the  retreat  of  the  armies.  Everybody's  ears 
were  strained  for  news  "from  the  front."  In  order,  therefore, 


as  the  South  had  departed  from  Jefferson's  views  on  the  moral  evil 
of  slavery,  they  still  held  to  his  belief  in  the  virtual  coercion  of  Great  Britain 
through  commercial  pressure.  "There  is  the  key,"  said  a  Charleston  merchant 
to  the  correspondent  of  the  London  Times,  pointing  to  a  wharf  piled  high  with 
cotton  bales,  "which  will  open  all  our  ports  and  put  us  into  John  Bull's  strong 
box  as  well."  A  Charleston  paper  advised  an  embargo  on  cotton  as  the  weapon 
to  force  the  recognition  of  the  Confederacy. 

2  How  little  this  spirit  was  realized  in  the  North  is  shown  by  Seward's  opti- 
mistic program  of  the  reduction  of  "  a  state  a  month  "  to  allegiance  to  the  Union, 
and  the  quite  general  opinion  that  secession  was  "the  work  of  a  strong  and  un- 
scrupulous minority,"  who  could  be  cowed  by  a  show  of  force.  Lincoln,  in  his 
address  to  Congress  on  July  4,  could  still  question  "whether  there  is  today  a 
majority  of  the  legally  qualified  voters  of  any  state,  except,  perhaps,  South 
Carolina,  in  favor  of  disunion." 


552  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

to  give  as  clear  a  view  as  possible  of  the  progress  of  the  conflict, 
we  shall  postpone  to  the  following  section  important  matters 
touching  the  public  and  private  life  of  North  and  South  during 
the  war  and  here  confine  our  attention  to  the  field  of  battle. 

Not  that  we  shall  attempt  to  follow  in  detail  the  marching 
and  countermarching  of  dozens  of  armies,  invading  or  defend- 
ing the  enormous  area  stretching  800  miles  from  the  Potomac 
to  the  Gulf  and  1700  miles  -from  the  Atlantic  seaboard  to 
the  western  boundary  of  Texas.  The  Official  Records  of  the 
Union  and  Confederate  Armies  and  Navies  in  the  War  of  the 
Rebellion  fill  130  large  volumes  and  describe  over  2000  en- 
gagements, of  which  150  are  dignified  by  the  name  of  "battles." 
Livermore's  "Numbers  and  Losses  in  the  Civil  War"  estimates 
the  Union  enlistments  on  a  three  years'  basis  at  1,556,878  and 
the  Confederate  at  1,082,119.  A  bare  list  of  the  titles  of  works 
dealing  with  the  military  and  political  history  of  the  war  would 
fill  many  more  pages  than  we  have  to  devote  to  the  description 
of  its  course.1  Without  trespassing,  therefore,  on  the  techni- 
cal field  of  military  strategy  and  tactics  or  noticing  the  minor 
operations,  we  shall  follow  the  few  great  campaigns  on  which 
the  fortunes  of  the  struggle  were  staked. 

At  the  beginning  of  July,  1861,  there  were  in  the  camps 
around  Washington  about  30,000  raw  and  undisciplined  troops, 
whom  General  Scott  wished  to  train  in  garrison  duty.  Some 
thirty-five  miles  to  the  southwest  General  Beauregard  was  in 
command  of  22,000  Confederates  at  the  important  station  of 
Manassas,  the  junction  of  the  Manassas  Gap  and  the  Orange 
and  Alexandria  railroads.  In  the  Shenandoah  Valley,  to  the 
west,  lay  9000  Confederates,  commanded  by  Joseph  E.  John- 
ston, lately  Quartermaster-General  of  the  army  of  the  United 
States.  A  mediocre  general  (Patterson)  with  a  superior  force 
confronted  Johnston  at  Harpers  Ferry. 

The  diminished  Congress  of  the  United  States  met  in  extra 
session  on  July  4.  The  Confederate  Congress  was  called  to 


iQne  list,  published  only  a  year  after  the  conclusion  of  the  war  (Bartlett's 
"Literature  of  the  Rebellion"),  contains  6073  such  titles. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  553 

meet  at  Richmond  on  July  20.  The  Northern  press  was  clam- 
oring for  action.  A  sharp,  prompt  blow  must  end  the  war  at 
once.  The  "rebel"  Congress  must  not  be  allowed  to  meet. 
Foreign  nations,  especially  Great  Britain,  which  had  recognized 
the  belligerency  of  the  Confederacy,  must  be  shown  that  the 
United  States  had  the  power  to  nip  sedition  in  the  bud.  Be- 
sides, the  three  months'  term  of  the  volunteers  was  soon  to 
expire.  To  what  end  had  they  been  called  and  drilled  in 
Washington  if  they  were  not  to  be  used  ?  "On  to  Richmond ! " 
was  the  cry.  Scott  protested  that  the  troops  were  not  ready ; 
some  of  them  had  been  in  camp  less  than  a  week.  General 
Irvin  McDowell,  who  was  the  field  commander,  agreed  with 
his  chief,  but  reluctantly  consented  to  move  on  Manassas  if 
he  could  be  assured  (as  he  was)  that  Patterson  would  hold 
Johnston  in  the  valley.  So  the  30,000  set  forth,  an  undisci- 
plined host,  hastily  brigaded,  straggling  by  the  way  to  pick 
berries  or  take  naps  under  the  trees,  and  accompanied  by  sev- 
eral congressmen  who  rode  out  to  see  the  victory.  Before 
McDowell  had  completed  his  plans  for  crossing  Bull  Run,  the 
little  stream  which  flows  just  north  of  Manassas,  Johnston  had 
slipped  away  from  Patterson  and  joined  Beauregard  with  three 
of  his  four  brigades.  Long  before  dawn  of  Sunday,  July  20, 
McDowell  launched  his  well-planned  offensive  from  the  north 
and  west  to  turn  the  Confederate  left  flank.  Through  the  in- 
tolerable heat  of  the  midday  hours  the  battle  raged  about  the 
Henry  House  Hill,  where  Thomas  J.  Jackson  stood  "like  a 
stone  wall"  between  the  Confederates  and  defeat.  President 
Davis,  arriving  on  the  field  from  Richmond  in  the  early  after- 
noon, was  met  by  a  fugitive  who  told  him  that  the  battle  was 
lost.  But  at  3.30  the  rest  of  Johnston's  army  arrived  from  the 
valley  and  was  forthwith  thrown  into  the  fray.  The  Confed- 
erates rallied  for  a  bayonet  charge  which  decided  the  fortunes 
of  the  day.  Exhausted  by  more  than  twelve  continuous  hours 
of  marching  and  fighting,  the  Union  troops  broke  and  fled.  All 
the  afternoon  and  night  they  were  pouring  back  into  Washing- 
ton, leaving  guns  and  baggage  by  the  way,  as  if  in  a  race  with 
the  discomfited  congressmen  to  see  which  could  reach  the 


554  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

shelter  of  the  city  fortifications  first.  Great  was  their  relief 
and  surprise  when  they  discovered  that  the  Confederates  were 
not  on  their  heels.1 

In  spite  of  the  humiliation  and  chagrin,  the  defeat  at  Bull 
Run  was  a  blessing  in  disguise  for  the  North.  It  swept  away 
once  and  for  all  the  fool's  paradise  of  easy  optimism  and  faith 
in  the  collapse  of  the  "rebellion"  at  the  first  touch  of  the 
Ithuriel  spear  point  of  the  North.  On  the  morrow  of  the  battle 
the  disillusioned  government  set  to  work  in  earnest  to  pre- 
pare for  the  war.  Lincoln  rode  through  the  encampments  of 
Washington,  encouraging  the  men  with  words  of  kindly  cheer. 
Congress  met  the  emergency  with  courage.  It  ratified  the  Presi- 
dent's exercise  of  extraordinary  war  powers,  authorized  loans 
and  taxes,  and  passed  a  resolution  to  the  effect  that  the  war 
was  waged  "not  for  conquest  or  subjugation,  or  to  overthrow 
or  interfere  with  the  rights  of  the  established  institutions  of  the 
sovereign  states,  but  to  maintain  the  supremacy  of  the  Consti- 
tution and  to  preserve  the  Union."  On  the  eve  of  its  adjourn- 
ment, August  i,  Congress  passed  a  Confiscation  Act,  releasing 
from  their  masters'  claims  any  slaves  who  were  employed  in 
military  duties  against  the  United  States.2  To  this  the  Con- 
federate Congress  replied  with  a  Sequestration  Act,  ordering 

1  "Stonewall"  Jackson,  standing  on  the  heights  above  Bull  Run  with  Presi- 
dent Davis  after  the  victory,  oblivious  of  his  wounded  hand  in  the  exaltation 
which  battle  always  inspired  in  him,  begged  to  be  allowed  to  follow  up  the 
retreating  foe.   "With  10,000  troops,"  he  said,  "I  will  take  Washington  tomor- 
row."   But  the  Confederates  were  in  no  condition  to  assault  the  strong  defenses 
of  the  city.   They  too  were  raw  levies,  and  had  perhaps  been  saved  from  a  rout 
as  complete  as  that  of  the  Union  army  only  by  the  fortunate  arrival  of  John- 
ston's fourth  brigade.   The  commander  himself  thought  that  the  Confederates 
were  "  more  disorganized  by  victory  than  the  United  States  army  by  defeat." 

2  When  fugitive  slaves  had  come  within  the  lines  of  General  B.  F.  Butler's 
command  at  Fortress  Monroe  in  the  early  summer,  he  refused  to  give  them  up 
to  their  masters  and  set  them  to  work  on  his  own  fortifications.    He  called  them 
"contraband  of  war,"  and  "contraband"  continued  to  be  the  nickname  of  the 
confiscated  negroes  throughout  the  war.    Lincoln  insisted,  but  not  with  very 
great  success,  that  only  those  negroes  should  be  retained  who  came  within  the 
definition  of  the  Confiscation  Act. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  555 

i 

Southerners  who  owed  debts  to  the  Northern  merchants  and 
bankers  to  pay  the  money  into  the  Confederate  treasury.1 

McDowell's  defeat  made  the  choice  of  a  new  commander 
necessary,  excellent  as  his  conduct  of  the  battle  had  been.  The 
man  to  whom  the  administration  turned,  with  the  enthusiastic 
approval  of  the  entire  North,  was  the  hero  of  the  West  Vir- 
ginia campaign.  George  B.  McClellan,  not  yet  thirty-five  years 
old,  a  graduate  of  West  Point  and  a  veteran  of  the  Mexican 
War,  had  probably  the  best  military  education  of  all  the  gen- 
erals of  the  North.  He  was  a  magnificent  organizer,  a  tireless 
worker,  an  inspiring  commander,  and  withal  a  gentleman  with 
a  winning  personality  and  the  highest  devotion  to  his  country. 
He  took  the  demoralized  army  of  Bull  Run  and  the  tens  of 
thousands  of  recruits  that  poured  into  the  encampments  about 
Washington  and  trained  them  into  one  of  the  most  efficient 
armies  that  the  world  has  ever  seen.  Yet  he  was  a  failure, 
because  he  didn't  know  how  to  use  the  great  Army  of  the 
Potomac  which  he  had  trained.  He  talked  much  about  what 
he  was  going  to  do;  but  he  was  never  quite  ready  to  act.  His 
soldiers  were  too  precious  to  risk.  The  responsibility  of  com- 
manding an  army  which  by  December  had  swelled  to  nearly 
200,000  men  was  too  great  for  him;  and  indeed  it  might  well 
have  paralyzed  the  nerve  of  a  man  of  riper  years  and  experience. 
As  month  after  month  passed,  and  the  administration  and  the 
people  grew  impatient  of  inaction,  McClellan  became  a  prey 
to  obsessions  which  rendered  him  useless.  He  persisted  in 
ridiculous  exaggeration  of  Johnston's  forces.  When  he  himself 
had  over  150,000  men  and  Johnston  was  vainly  trying  to  get 
his  army  of  41,000  at  Manassas  reenforced  by  15,000  or  20,000 


act  was  expected  to  yield  an  enormous  sum,  as  the  war  broke  out  in 
the  spring,  when  the  indebtedness  of  the  South  to  the  North  was  at  its  maxi- 
mum. The  Richmond  Dispatch  estimated  that  Virginia's  contribution  alone 
would  be  "at  least  $15,000,000,"  and  the  New  Orleans  Delta  put  Louisiana's  at 
$12,000,000.  But  the  Southern  planters  and  merchants  preferred  to  pay  neither 
their  Northern  creditors  nor  their  own  treasury.  In  December,  1863,  the  Con- 
federate Secretary  of  the  Treasury  reported  only  $1,812,550  received  from  the 
Sequestration  Act. 


556  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

troops,  McClellan  wrote  that  the  enemy  had  "  three  or  four 
times"  his  own  numbers.  Worst  of  all,  he  nursed  a  grievance 
that  he  was  not  appreciated  and  that  the  "imbecile"  adminis- 
tration at  Washington  was  doing  all  it  could  to  cause  the  ruin 
of  his  army.  He  quarreled  with  Stanton  and  Halleck  and 
treated  Lincoln  with  supercilious  discourtesy.  In  the  letters 
written  to  his  wife  at  the  time,  and  in  "McClellan's  Own  Story," 
an  apology  written  twenty  years  later,  he  appears  in  a  most 
unfavorable  light,  as  an  inspired  genius  who  had  "saved  his 
country,"  whereas  he  had  really  only  saved  his  army — from 
fighting.  So  the  autumn  and  winter  passed  amid  anxieties  and 
vexations  for  the  North,  the  expenses  mounting  from  $175,000 
to  over  $1,000,000  a  day,  incompetence  and  corruption  in  the 
War  Department  under  Cameron,  inefficiency  and  insubordi- 
nation in  the  Department  of  the  West  under  the  vain,  con- 
temptuous Fremont,  an  ugly  quarrel  with  England  over  the 
Trent  affair,  an  almost  undisguised  hostility  on  the  part  of  the 
ruling  and  commercial  classes  in  Great  Britain  and  France, — 
seven  months  of  war  with  no  step  forward,  but  only  the  monot- 
onous echo  of  the  patrols  of  the  great  idle  army  on  which  the 
hopes  of  millions  were  fixed:  "All  quiet  along  the  Potomac! " 
Before  McClellan  started  his  long-deferred  advance  on  Rich- 
mond, in  March,  1862,  events  of  the  first  importance  had  hap- 
pened in  the  Mississippi  Valley  and  on  the  Atlantic  coast.  We 
have  seen  how  Governor  Magoffin  tried  to  keep  Kentucky 
neutral  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  and  how  careful  President 
Lincoln  was  not  to  drive  the  state  into  the  arms  of  the  Con- 
federacy by  coercion  or  invasion.  But  so  anxious  was  the  gov- 
ernment at  Richmond  to  win  this  great  state,  which  extended 
from  Virginia  to  the  Mississippi  and  whose  possession  would 
bring  the  borders  of  the  Confederacy  to  the  Ohio,  that  General 
Polk  was  allowed  to  seize  Columbus  early  in  September,  1861, 
and  extend  his  lines  to  Bowling  Green,  near  the  center  of  the 
state.  The  political  and  military  effects  of  this  move  appeared 
forthwith.  The  legislature  of  Kentucky,  after  calling  in  vain 
on  Polk  to  withdraw  his  troops,  passed  measures  definitely 
aligning  the  state  on  the  Union  side,  and  the  Federal  forces 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  557 

in  the  West  prepared  to  break  Folk's  line.  The  command  of 
the  Union  armies  west  of  the  Alleghenies  was  divided  between 
two  generals.  tW.  H.  Halleck's  authority  reached  from  Missouri 
eastward  to  the  center  of  Kentucky,  and  Don  Carlos  Buell's 
extended  from  that  point  to  the  Alleghenies.  BuelPs  plan  was 
to  march  southward  to  rally  the  Unionists  of  eastern  Tennessee 
to  his  banners ;  and  an  auspicious  beginning  was  made  when  his 
brigadier  general  George  H.  Thomas  caught  a  Confederate  army 
which  had  come  through  the  Cumberland  Gap  into  eastern 
Kentucky  under  General  Zollicoffer,  and  defeated  it  at  Mill 
Springs,  January  19,  1862.  It  was  the  first  gleam  of  success 
for  the  Federal  arms  since  the  disaster  at  Bull  Run.  But  BuelPs 
plans  were  interrupted  by  developments  further  west,  where 
in  the  short  space  of  fifty  miles  the  four  great  rivers  the  Missis- 
sippi, the  Ohio,  the  Cumberland,  and  the  Tennessee  mingle 
their  waters.  Halleck's  brigadier  general  in  this  region  was 
a  short,  compact,  taciturn  man  of  thirty-nine,  who,  since  his 
service  in  the  Mexican  War,  had  waged  an  unequal  battle  with 
poverty,  obscurity,  laziness,  and  liquor.  Lincoln's  call  to  arms 
found  him  a  clerk  in  his  father's  leather  store  in  Galena, 
Illinois,  and  it  instantly  transformed  him  into  the  man  of 
destiny — Ulysses  S.  Grant. 

To  guard  the  interior  of  Tennessee  and  protect  the  Memphis 
and  Charleston  railroad,  the  Confederates  had  built  Forts  Henry 
and  Donelson  on  the  Tennessee  and  Cumberland  Rivers  respec- 
tively, close  to  the  Kentucky  line.  The  forts  were  back  to  back 
and  only  twelve  miles  apart,  so  that  troops  could  be  moved  from 
one  to  the  other  in  a  short  day's  march.  Grant  got  permission 
from  Halleck  to  attack  these  forts  and  started  up  the  Tennessee 
River  from  Paducah  with  15,000  men,  supported  by  Flag- 
Officer  Foote  with  a  fleet  of  seven  formidably  armed  gunboats. 
Foote's  heavy  cannon  reduced  Fort  Henry  easily  enough,  but 
not  until  General  Tilghman  had  transferred  practically  all  his 
garrison  of  3000  men  to  Fort  Donelson.  Then  Grant  marched 
across  the  "isthmus,"  while  Foote  took  the  gunboats  around  by 
the  rivers.  But  the  capture  of  Fort  Donelson  was  as  difficult  as 
that  of  Fort  Henry  had  been  easy.  The  higher  guns,  command- 


558  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ing  the  winding  approaches  of  the  Cumberland,  kept  Footers 
fleet  from  effective  work,  and  before  Grant  was  ready  to  attack, 
Albert  Sidney  Johnston,  the  ablest  Confederate  general  in  the 
West,  had  increased  the  garrison  of  Fort  Donelson  to  20,000 
men.  Grant  invested  the  fort,  but  the  Confederates,  making  a 
sortie  in  the  early  morning  of  February  15,  drove  back  his 
right  wing  under  General  McClernand  and  seemed  to  have  a 
clear  path  of  escape  to  Nashville.  Unfortunately  for  them, 
they  postponed  their  march  until  the  morrow.  Grant  was  on 
a  gunboat  in  conference  with  Foote  when  he  heard  of  Mc- 
Clernand's  plight.  Repairing  to  the  scene  at  once,  he  restored 
the  morale  of  the  troops,  launched  a  general  attack,  and  before 
nightfall  had  recovered  his  original  lines.  The  counsels  of  the 
commanders  of  the  fort  were  at  variance;  the  spirit  of  the 
garrison  was  broken.  When  General  Buckner,  who  had  been 
deserted  by  his  colleagues,  Floyd  and  Pillow,  sent  to  Grant 
the  next  morning  to  ask  terms,  the  Union  commander  replied : 
"No  terms  except  unconditional  and  immediate  surrender  can 
be  accepted.  I  propose  to  move  immediately  upon  your  works." 
Buckner  surrendered  with  14,000  prisoners,  20,000  stands  of 
arms,  and  48  pieces  of  artillery. 

The  effect  of  the  victory  at  Fort  Donelson  was  tremendous. 
For  the  North  it  was  the  reparation  of  the  disaster  of  Bull  Run. 
"The  underpinning  seems  to  have  been  knocked  from  under 
the  rebellion,"  said  Chase.  Jefferson  Davis,  inaugurating  the 
"permanent"  Confederate  government  at  Richmond  on  Feb- 
ruary 22,  spoke  of  "the  recent  serious  disasters"  as  marking 
"the  darkest  hour  of  our  struggle."1  The  sympathizers  with 
the  Confederacy  in  England,  who  had  been  proclaiming  in  press 
and  Parliament  that  the  North  was  beaten,  were  hushed.2  Ken- 
tucky was  now  secure  for  the  Union.  Buell  entered  Nashville 

1  Besides  Donelson,  the  "disasters"  were  the  defeat  at  Mill  Springs  (Jan- 
uary 19)  and  the  capture  of  Roanoke  Island  (February  7). 

2 Henry  Adams  writes  to  his  brother  Charles  Francis,  Jr.,  from  London,  "The 
English  on  hearing  of  Donelson  and  the  fall  of  Nashville,  seem  to  think  our 
dozen  armies  are  already  across  the  St.  Lawrence  and  at  the  gates  of  Quebec" 
("A  Cycle  of  Adams  Letters"  (W.  C.  Ford,  Ed.),  Vol.  I,  p.  120). 


1    P        K    J « 

I    r    GettyBiurg.    .._. 


Railroads 

Limits  of  Confederate  Power.  April,  1861 


«       July,  1863.. — 
"         «      1864 
Grant  and  Farraguts-  Mississippi 

Campaigns  oM862  and  1863 *  x_x.x  x  x  x 

Buell,  Rosecrans,  .andJBraggs'  Kentucky 

and  Tennessee  Campaigns  of  1862 o  0.010000.0  00.00 

Morgan's  raid  1863 

Sherman's  March  1864-1865. 

Hood's  Campaign  against  Thomas  1864 


THE  WAR  IN  THE  MISSISSIPPI  VALLEY 


560  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

without  striking  a  blow.  The  first  Confederate  line  of  defense 
in  the  West  was  shattered,  and  the  army  of  Johnston  retired 
to  Corinth,  Mississippi.  An  imposing  procession  of  more  than 
80  Union  steamers,  loaded  with  exultant  men,  swept  up  the  Ten- 
nessee toward  the  strategic  points  on  the  Alabama  and  Missis- 
sippi frontiers.  By  April  Grant's  army,  45,000  strong,  was 
concentrated  at  Pittsburg  Landing  and  Shiloh  on  the  Tennessee 
River,  only  fifteen  miles  from  the  Mississippi  border,  and  Buell, 
with  36,000  men,  was  on  his  way  from  Nashville  to  join  him. 

In  order  to  prevent  this  junction,  Johnston  and  Beauregard 
led  their  army  of  40,000  out  of  Corinth  to  attack  Grant  at 
Pittsburg  Landing.  The  Union  commander  was  taken  by  sur- 
prise. In  his  confident  belief  that  the  spirit  of  the  Southern 
army  had  been  broken  by  the  disasters  in  Tennessee,1  he  had 
neglected  to  fortify  his  position,  although  the  enemy  were  but 
twenty  miles  away.  The  furious  attack  of  the  Confederates 
on  the  morning  of  April  6  drove  in  the  Federal  outposts,  and 
Johnston  boasted  that  he  would  water  his  horses  in  the  Ten- 
nessee River  that  evening.  But  while  the  sun  was  still  high 
the  gallant  commander  was  killed,  leading  a  frontal  attack  on 
a  strong  Union  position,  and  night  fell  with  the  desperate  battle 
still  undecided  but  with  the  Federal  troops  sadly  demoralized.2 
The  next  morning  Buell  and  Lew  Wallace  brought  25,000  fresh 
men  onto  the  field,  and  the  tables  were  turned.  Beauregard 
made  a  stubborn  fight  of  eight  hours  against  great  odds,  but 
was  finally  forced  to  retreat  to  Corinth,  which  he  evacuated 
a  few  days  later  before  the  advance  of  the  Federal  army. 
The  Confederates  had  lost  11,000  men  and  their  great  com- 
mander. The  Union  loss  was  13,000.  These  numbers  seem 
trifling  when  compared  with  the  statistics  of  carnage  in  the 
recent  World  War,  but  no  battle  of  our  country's  history 

1  Grant  wrote  in  his  "Memoirs"  in  1884,  "My  opinion  was  and  still  is  that 
immediately  after  the  fall  of  Fort  Donelson  the  way  was  open  to  the  National 
forces  all  over  the  Southwest  without  much  resistance." 

2  Nelson,  arriving  with  the  vanguard  of  BuelPs  army  at  the  Tennessee  River 
late  in  the  afternoon  of  the  first  day  of  the  battle,  reported  that  he  found 
"  cowering  under  the  river  bank  from  7000  to  10,000  men  frantic  with  fright  and 
utterly  demoralized." 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  561 

had  ever  witnessed  such  slaughter  as  that  at  Shiloh.  Thousands 
of  homes  in  the  West  were  plunged  in  mourning.  Chicago  was 
a  city  of  gloom. 

As  Grant  had  moved  up  the  Tennessee,  General  Pope  and  Com- 
modore Foote  went  down  the  Mississippi  in  a  parallel  course, 
reducing  the  Confederate  fortifications  at  Island  No.  itf,  New 
Madrid,  and  Fort  Pillow,  and  opening  the  great  river  as  far  as 
the  beetling  cliffs  above  Vicksburg.  Meanwhile,  "as  the  crown- 
ing stroke  of  adverse  fortune," — to  use  the  words  of  the  Con- 
federate Secretary  of  War, — the  Southerners  saw  the  fall  of  the 
"Queen  City"  at  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi.  On  the  night  of 
April  24  Flag-Officer  David  G.  Farragut,  commanding  the  West 
Gulf  blockading  squadron,  with  seventeen  ships,  ran  the  gauntlet 
of  fire  from  Forts  Jackson  and  St.  Philip  on  the  lower  Mississippi, 
which  guarded  the  approaches  to  New  Orleans.  It  was  the 
most  spectacular  event  of  the  war  as  the  fleet  crept  up  the  river 
through  the  blackness  of  night  and  smoke,  its  perilous  path 
murkily  lighted  by  the  incessant  fire  of  the  Confederate  guns 
and  the  high  columns  of  pitchy  flame  rising  from  the  fire  rafts. 
"At  length,"  said  Farragut,  "the  fire  slackened,  the  smoke 
cleared  off,  and  we  saw  to  our  surprise  that  we  were  above  the 
forts."  The  way  to  New  Orleans  was  open.  Farragut  reached 
the  panic-stricken  city  the  next  day  and  anchored  off  the  levee, 
where  he  found  "ships,  steamers,  cotton,  coal,  etc.  all  in  one 
common  blaze."  On  May  i  General  B.  F.  Butler  occupied  the 
city  with  Union  troops  and  ruled  it  for  six  months  with  a  ruth- 
lessness  which  has  made  his  name  a  byword  in  the  South  to 
this  day.  Farragut  sailed  up  the  river  to  Vicksburg,  but  found 
his  fleet  too  feeble  to  reduce  the  fortifications  and  returned  to 
New  Orleans.  The  Confederates  then  fortified  Port  Hudson, 
Louisiana,  to  protect  the  mouth  of  the  Red  River,  through  which 
vast  supplies  of  grain,  horses,  cattle,  and  produce  were  brought 
from  Texas,  Arkansas,  and  western  Louisiana  to  the  eastern 
bank  of  the  Mississippi.  This  important  "bridge"  of  one 
hundred  and  twenty-five  miles  from  Port  Hudson  to  Vicksburg 
was  all  of  the  Mississippi  that  was  left  to  the  Confederacy  by 
the  midsummer  of  1862. 


562  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

While  the  Union  armies  and  river  fleets  were  achieving  these 
victories  in  the  Mississippi  Valley,  the  blockading  squadrons 
were  tightening  their  cordon  around  the  Atlantic  and  Gulf 
shores  of  the  Confederate  states.  The  South  had  no  navy  and 
virtually  no  merchant  marine  from  which  a  navy  could  be  im- 
provised. For,  in  spite  of  magnificent  advantages  for  ship- 
building, this  industry  had  failed  to  attract  capital  away  from 
the  absorbing  monopoly  of  slaves  and  cotton.1  In  1854  there 
were  constructed  485,763  tons  of  shipping  in  the  free  states, 
as  against  48,053  in  the  slave  states  —  and  of  that  48,053  more 
than  half  was  built  in  the  states  of  Maryland  and  Delaware. 
Maine  alone  launched  168,632  tons  in  that  year,  to  11,862  from 
all  the  states  from  the  mouth  of  the  Potomac  to  the  mouth  of 
the  Rio  Grande.  While  the  South  was  trying  to  buy  ships 
abroad,  the  North  was  busy  converting  every  kind  of  craft- 
merchantmen,  excursion  boats,  pleasure  yachts,  and  tugs  —  into 
ships  of  war.  By  the  close  of  1861  the  Federal  navy  consisted 
of  264  ships,  with  2575  guns  and  over  20,000  seamen.  Four 
main  squadrons  guarded  the  3500  miles  of  blockaded  coast 
from  Virginia  to  Texas,  to  prevent  cotton  from  leaving  the 
Southern  ports  and  military  supplies  from  entering  them.  The 
capture  of  Hatteras  Inlet  (August  29,  1861),  Port  Royal  (No- 
vember 7),  Roanoke  Island  (February  8;  1862),  and  Fort 
Pulaski,  guarding  the  entrance  to  Savannah  (April  n),  gave 
the  Federal  navy  control  of  all  the  important  points  on  the 
Atlantic  coast  except  Wilmington  and  Charleston,  but  until 
Farragut's  exploit  at  New  Orleans  no  considerable  Confederate 
port  on  the  Gulf  was  taken.  At  first  the  South  tried  to  bring 
pressure  to  bear  on  England  to  break  the  blockade,  by  with- 
holding cotton  which  might  easily  have  been  run  through  the 


New  Orleans  Delta  said:  "We  possess  the  finest  ship  timber  in  the 
world,  in  inexhaustible  quantities,  which  is  easy  of  access  and  can  be  transported 
cheaply  to  any  point.  Almost  every  day  this  timber  is  cut  down,  split,  hewed 
and  sawed  into  proper  lengths  and  shapes,  and  sent  to  the  Northern  ship-yards 
.  .  .  where  it  is  used  in  the  construction  of  vessels,  many  of  which  come  back 
here  and  engage  in  the  transportation  of  Southern  produce."  North  Carolina, 
once  a  great  shipbuilding  state,  had  to  rely  even  for  craft  to  carry  its  coasting- 
trade  "on  the  canal  boats  of  Norfolk  and  the  New  England  vessels." 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  563 

scattered  Federal  squadrons.  Only  19,127  bales  were  exported 
in  1 86 1  as  against  615,000  in  1860.  But  as  their  hopes  of  in- 
tervention by  England  and  France  faded,  the  Southerners  de- 
veloped the  hazardous  but  profitable  business  of  exchanging 
cotton  for  munitions,  clothing,  medicines,  and  luxuries  by  means 
of  narrow,  swift,  lead-colored  blockade-runners,  plying  between 
Wilmington,  Charleston,  Mobile,  or  Galveston  and  the  West 
Indian  ports  of  Nassau  or  Havana.1 

While  Grant's  victorious  Donelson  army  was  being  trans- 
ported up  the  Tennessee,  the  South  made  a  bold  attempt  to 
break  the  blockade  on  the  Atlantic  coast.  Raising  the  4o-gun 
frigate  Merrimac,  which  had  been  sunk  when  the  Federal  officer 
abandoned  the  Norfolk  navy  yard  on  the  secession  of  Virginia, 
the  Confederates  cut  her  down  to  the  water's  edge  and  erected 
a  large  rectangular  casemate  on  her  hull,  whose  sloping  sides 
they  covered  with  4-inch  iron  plates.  To  her  prow  they  fas- 
tened an  iron  ram.  This  formidable  but  slow  and  unwieldy 
ironclad,  rechristened  the  Virginia,  crept  into  Hampton  Roads 
on  March  8,  1862,  and  proceeded  to  demolish  the  wooden  ships 
of  the  Federal  navy,  whose  shots  glanced  off  her  sides  like 
pebbles  from  a  sling.  She  rammed  a  hole  in  the  3O-gun  sloop 
Cumberland  and  sank  her.  The  5o-gun  frigate  Congress  ran 
aground  to  escape  capture,  but  the  Virginia  set  her  aflame  with 
red-hot  shot.  The  steam  frigate  Minnesota  was  also  aground, 
waiting  like  a  trembling  animal  at  bay  for  her  fate.  But  the 
Virginia,  leaking  and  her  engines  overstrained,  drew  off  to 
prepare  for  the  destruction  of  the  rest  of  the  ships  the  next 
day.  Four  hours  later  another  outlandish  craft  steamed  into 
Hampton  Roads.  This  was  the  Monitor,  designed  by  Captain 
Ericsson  and  built  in  three  months'  time  to  thwart  the  Virginia. 
From  the  center  of  the  Monitor's  deck,  which  was  flush  with 
the  water,  rose  a  revolving  turret  20  feet  in  diameter,  armed 
with  two  1 1 -inch  guns.  She  was  nicknamed  "a  cheese  box  on 

1  Lieutenant  Colonel  Freeman  tie,  an  English  visitor,  wrote  in  his  "Three 
Months  in  the  Southern  States"  (p.  202)  that  he  saw  in  Wilmington,  in  June, 
1863,  "eight  large  steamers,  all  handsome,  leaden  colored  vessels,  which  ply 
their  trade  with  the  greatest  regularity." 


564  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  raft."  During  the  entire  morning  of  March  9  these  two 
strange  ironclads  bombarded  each  other  with  little  harm  to 
either;  and  then  the  Virginia  withdrew,  leaving  the  wooden 
ships  safe — but  henceforth  as  obsolete  for  naval  warfare  as 
Noah's  Ark.1 

Month  after  month  McClellan  held  his  fine  army  inactive  on 
the  Potomac,  while  Johnston's  force  at  Manassas,  of  less  than 
one  third  of  his  own,  was  all  that  stood  between  him  and  Rich- 
mond. McClellan  persisted  in  believing  that  he  was  confronted 
by  an  army  vastly  superior  to  his  own,  and  superciliously  ig- 
nored both  the  administration's  entreaties  that  he  should  march 
on  Richmond  and  his  own  subordinates'  better  estimate  of  the 
enemy's  strength.  Even  Lincoln's  positive  order  for  a  general 
advance  on  February  22  failed  to  budge  the  Fabian  commander. 
On  that  day,  however,  Johnston  abandoned  his  dangerous  posi- 
tion at  Manassas.  McClellan  followed  him — but  not  to  Rich- 
mond. To  the  President's  disappointment,  he  changed  his  plans 
and  decided  to  take  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  down  to  the 
mouth  of  Chesapeake  Bay  and  approach  Richmond  by  the 
peninsula  between  the  York  and  James  Rivers.  Relieved  to 
see  McClellan  move  in  any  direction,  the  administration  ap- 
proved his  plan,  but  only  with  the  understanding  that  the  city 
of  Washington  must  not  be  left  unprotected.  The  troops  were 
ferried  down  the  Potomac,  and  on  April  2  McClellan  joined 
them  at  his  base  at  Fortress  Monroe.  The  Confederate  general 
Magruder  held  a  thirteen-mile  line  between  the  rivers,  thinly 
defended  by  some  11,000  men.  McClellan  should  have  broken 
this  line  like  a  thread  and  been  on  his  way  up  the  peninsula, 
but  instead  he  settled  down  with  an  elaborate  train  to  besiege 
Yorktown — and  scold  the  administration.  After  delaying  him 
for  more  than  a  month  before  Yorktown,  which  bristled  with 
wooden  guns  painted  black,  Magruder  slipped  away,  leaving 
McClellan  with  his  empty  prize.  The  Union  general  followed 
with  the  utmost  caution,  taking  two  weeks  to  cover  the  forty 

1  Neither  boat  was  destined  to  last  long.  When  the  Confederates  evacuated 
Norfolk  in  May,  they  blew  up  the  Virginia.  The  Monitor,  unable  to  stand 
rough  seas,  sank  in  a  storm  off  Cape  Hatteras  in  December. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  565 

miles  between  Yorktown  and  his  new  base  at  White  House  on 
the  Pamunkey  River.  Toward  the  end  of  May  the  Federal 
army  was  encamped  on  both  sides  of  the  Chickahominy  River, 
the  advance  posts  being  near  Fair  Oaks  station,  with  the  church 
spires  of  Richmond  clearly  visible  less  than  five  miles  away. 
All  this  time  the  Confederates  had  been  strengthening  their 
army,  until  Johnston  had  63,000  troops  to  oppose  McClellan's 
110,000.  On  May  31  Johnston  attacked  the  two  Federal  army 
corps  south  of  the  Chickahominy  River,  which  had  been  con- 
verted into  a  torrent  by  heavy  rains.  He  would  have  routed 
McClellan's  left  wing  completely  had  not  General  Sumner  led 
his  troops  across  the  submerged  and  swaying  bridge  and  saved 
the  day.  Johnston  was  knocked  from  his  horse  by  a  piece  of 
shell,  and  on  the  next  day  Robert  E.  Lee  assumed  command  of 
the  Army  of  Virginia. 

After  the  discomfiture  of  the  Confederates  at  Fair  Oaks,  it 
was  expected  that  McClellan  would  concentrate  his  army  south 
of  the  Chickahominy  and  move  directly  on  Richmond.  The 
city  was  in  a  state  of  panic  during  the  May  days.  It  seemed  as 
though  its  doom  were  sealed.  The  destruction  of  the  Virginia 
left  the  way  open  to  the  Federal  gunboats,  which  had  gone  up 
the  James  to  Drewry's  Bluff,  within  seven  miles  of  the  Confed- 
erate capital.  The  government  packed  up  its  archives  to  send  to 
Columbia  and  Lynchburg.  President  Davis  appointed  a  day  of 
public  prayer.  A  hostile  editor  of  Richmond  pictured  him  as 
"standing  in  a  corner  telling  his  beads,  and  relying  on  a  miracle 
to  save  the  country."  But  still  MgClellan  did  not  move.  He 
was  waiting  for  reinforcements.  President  Lincoln  had  prom- 
ised, now  that  his  army  was  again  between  Washington  and 
Richmond,  to  send  him  McDowell's  35,000  men,  who  had  been 
kept  back  to  defend  the  Federal  capital  when  the  Army  of  the 
Potomac  had  gone  down  to  Fortress  Monroe. 

But  McClellan  waited  for  his  reinforcements  in  vain.  Across 
the  Blue  Ridge,  in  the  valley  of  the  Shenandoah,  Stonewall 
Jackson  was  waging  the  most  wonderful  campaign  of  the  war. 
The  Federal  general  Banks  was  at  the  lower  end  of  the  valley 
with  10,000  men,  guarding  the  "back  door"  to  Washington. 


566  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Further  west  was  Fremont,  in  command  of  an  army  which  was 
rapidly  swelling  to  20,000,  while  McDowell's  corps  lay  close  to 
Washington.  Jackson  had  only  17,000  men,  but  he  made  them 
do  the  work  of  a  host,  moving  them  from  point  to  point  with  a 
rapidity  that  earned  them  the  name  of  "Jackson's  foot  cavalry." 
He  outwitted  the  pompous  Fremont,  the  impetuous  Banks,  and 
the  clever  Shields  at  every  point.  He  prevented  the  junction  of 
the  Federal  armies  and  accomplished  the  reunion  of  his  own 
raiding  parties  with  a  punctuality  that  was  little  short  of  mirac- 
ulous. He  drove  Banks  down  the  valley  and  across  the  Potomac ; 
and  when  McDowell's  corps  (which  had  been  promised  to 
McClellan)  were  sent  to  join  with  Shields  and  Fremont  to  cut 
him  off,  he  dashed  back  up  the  valley,  eluding  his  pursuers  and 
crossing  the  last  bridge  of  safety  just  as  Fremont's  troops  "ap- 
peared on  the  opposite  bank  of  the  swollen  Shenandoah  and 
wept  with  wrath  and  mortification,  as  they  stood  barred  by  the 
few  yards  of  swirling  torrent."  Then  the  great  strategist  slipped 
out  of  the  valley  and  entrained  for  Richmond,  leaving  his  mys- 
tified antagonists  groping  for  him  like  bandaged  boys  in  a  game 
of  blindman's  buff.  "In  forty-eight  days  he  had  marched  676 
miles,  fought  five  hard  battles,  accomplishing  in  each  his  pur- 
pose, baffled  three  Federal  armies,  his  17,000  matched  against 
50,000,  brought  off  prisoners  and  booty  unmeasured,  ruined  the 
campaign  of  McClellan,  and  stricken  the  North  with  terror." 
"The  fate  of  Richmond,"  say  Wood  and  Edmonds,  "was  de- 
cided not  on  the  banks  of  the  Chickahominy,  but  by  the  waters 
of  the  Shenandoah." 

Jackson  joined  Lee  at  Richmond  on  June  23,  and  the  two 
great  commanders  laid  their  plans  to  drive  McClellan  out  of 
the  peninsula.  On  the  twenty-seventh  the  Confederates,  55,000 
strong,  fell  upon  the  25,000  troops  of  General  Fitz-John  Porter 
at  Gaines's  Mill,  north  of  the  Chickahominy.  The  Unionists 
made  a  plucky  fight  but  were  borne  back  by  the  weight  of  num- 
bers, and  a  rout  like  that  of  Bull  Run  might  well  have  followed 
Lee's  call  for  a  final  charge  on  the  wavering  line  had  not  two 
brigades  from  Sumner's  corps  arrived  on  the  field  in  the  nick  of 
time  to  cover  the  retreat.  Lee's  bold  stroke  north  of  the  river 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  567 

had  left  only  25,000  men  under  Magruder  to  protect  the  capital. 
McClellan,  with  three  times  that  number,  had  then  the  golden 
chance  to  pounce  on  Richmond,  but  Magruder,  "the  prince  of 
bluff,"  marched  his  men  back  and  forth  like  a  stage  army, 
keeping  up  a  furious  discharge  of  cannonry,  until  McClellan 
was  convinced  that  he  "  would  have  to  meet  more  than  100,000 
men  if  he  marched  on  Richmond."  Instead,  he  executed  a  mas- 
terly retreat  across  the  peninsula  from  the  Chickahominy  to  the 
James,  ineffectually  harassed  by  Jackson  and  Lee.  Reaching 
the  James,  he  took  a  strong  position  on  Malvern  Hill,  against 
which  the  Confederates  delivered  a  frontal  attack  on  July  i. 
The  Union  army  hurled  back  the  impetuous  charge  with  heavy 
artillery  fire  and  deadly  infantry  volleys,  driving  brigade  after 
brigade  across  the  open  field  at  the  foot  of  the  hill.  The  defeat 
of  Gaines's  Mill  was  wiped  out.  In  the  week's  fighting  across  the 
peninsula  the  Union  army  had  lost  15,800  men  to  20,100  for  the 
Confederates.  The  morale  of  McClellan's  troops  at  Malvern 
Hill  was  perfect.  The  way  to  Richmond  was  again  open.  But 
McClellan,  to  the  chagrin  of  his  best  corps  commanders,  fell 
back  down  the  river  to  Harrison's  Landing,  under  the  protec- 
tion of  the  Federal  gunboats.  Thus  ended  the  famous  Penin- 
sular campaign. 

McClellan  has  found  defenders,  though  none  to  take  him  at 
the  full  value  of  his  own  rating  in  his  letters  and  his  apologia. 
No  doubt  he  was  sometimes  hampered  by  political  interference 
(as  what  general  has  not  been ! ).  The  administration  annoyed 
him  by  its  importunity  for  an  advance,  and  he 'had  enemies 
in  the  cabinet.  Lincoln  appointed  his  corps  commanders  with- 
out consulting  him.  He  was  denied  (for  reasons  which  we  have 
seen)  the  promised  reenforcement  by  McDowell's  corps.  But 
none  of  these  things  should  have  prevented  a  resolute  com- 
mander with  McClellan's  advantages  from  taking  Richmond. 
He  did  not  need  McDowell's  troops.  If  he  was  deceived  in  his 
estimate  of  the  Confederate  forces,  it  was  his  own  fault.  The 
cavalry  of  Lee  rode  completely  around  his  army  on  both  sides 
of  the  Chickahominy  in  June  and  could  report  the  number  and 
disposition  of  his  forces ;  yet  he,  almost  in  sight  of  Richmond, 


568  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

could  be  fooled  by  Magruder's  bluster  and  by  clever  lies  in 
the  newspapers  into  believing  himself  confronted  by  a  mighty 
host.  "Macbeth  himself  was  never  daunted  by  so  unsubstan- 
tial visions."  Moreover,  McClellan  was  always  attending  to 
some  more  important  matter  in  some  other  spot  at  the  moment 
of  battle.  When  the  armies  were  fighting  at  Fair  Oaks  on  the 
southern  side  of  the  river,  he  was  on  the  northern  side;  and 
when  they  fought  at  Gaines's  Mill  on  the  northern  side,  he  was 
on  the  southern  side.  He  was  not  on  the  field  at  Williamsburg 
at  the  beginning  of  the  campaign  or  at  Malvern  Hill  at  its 
close,  though  he  was  fully  aware  of  the  inspiration  which  his 
presence  gave  the  troops.  He  nursed  the  grievance  that  he  was 
unappreciated  and  unsupported  by  the  administration,  and  ex- 
pressed his  grievance  in  language  at  once  querulous,  boastful, 
and  insolent.1  The  task  intrusted  to  him  was  too  great  for  his 
powers.  Because  he  had  been  successful  on  a  small  stage,  he 
was  suddenly  called,  with  the  most  confident  expectations,  to 
fill  a  very  large  stage.  In  the  year  from  Bull  Run  to  Malvern 

iThe  following  are  samples  of  McClellan's  utterances  during  the  campaign: 
"  I  learn  that  Stanton  and  Chase  have  fallen  out.  .  .  .  Alas  !  poor  country  that 
should  have  such  rulers  !  I  tremble  for  my  country  when  I  think  of  these 
things.  [He  had  other  things  to  think  of  !]  When  I  see  such  insane  folly  be- 
hind me,  I  feel  that  the  final  salvation  of  my  country  demands  the  utmost  pru- 
dence on  my  part,  and  that  I  must  not  run  the  slightest  risk  of  disaster  [ !  ] ,  for 
if  anything  happened  to  this  army  our  cause  would  be  lost.  .  .  .  But  I  will  yet 
succeed,  notwithstanding  all  they  do  and  leave  undone  in  Washington  to  pre- 
vent it.  I  would  not  have  on  my  conscience  what  these  men  have  for  all  the 
world."  (To  his.  wife,  June  22.)  "I  know  that  a  few  more  thousand  men 
would  have  .changed  this  battle  [Gaines's  Mill]  from  a  defeat  to  a  victory.  As 
it  is,  the  government  must  not  and  cannot  hold  me  responsible  for  the  result. 
...  If  I  save  this  army  now,  I  tell  you  plainly  that  I  owe  no  thanks  to  you  or 
to  any  other  person  in  Washington.  You  have  done  your  best  to  sacrifice  this 
army."  (To  Secretary  Stanton,  June  28.)  "I  am  ready  for  an  attack  now 
[three  days  after  Malvern  Hill] ;  give  me  24  hours  even  and  I  will  defy  all 
secession."  (To  his  wife,  July  4.)  The  victims  of  the  "insane  folly"  at  Wash- 
ington replied  to  McClellan's  scoldings  with  kindly  forbearance.  Lincoln  tele- 
graphed, July  3 :  "  I  am  satisfied  that  yourself,  officers  and  men  have  done  the 
best  you  could.  All  accounts  say  no  better  fighting  was  ever  done.  Ten  thou- 
sands thanks  for  it."  Stanton  wrote,  July  5,  "Be  assured  that  you  have  the 
support  of  this  department  and  the  government  as  cordially  and  faithfully  as 
ever  was  rendered  by  man  to  man." 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  569 

Hill  he  built  and  trained  a  great  army.  But  his  inability 
to  use  that  army  postponed  for  three  years  the  fall  of  the 
Confederate  capital. 

Bitter  as  was  the  disappointment  at  McClellan's  failure,  the 
North  rallied  with  enthusiasm.  Great  mass  meetings  were  held 
in  the  cities  to  pledge  recruits  and  money.  The  governors  of 
eighteen  states  offered  Lincoln  300,000  more  men.  Generals 
Halleck  and  Pope  were  called  from  the  West,  the  former  to 
assume  the  direction  from  Washington  of  all  the  Union  armies 
in  the  field,  the  latter  to  command  the  new  Army  of  Virginia, 
50,000  strong,  composed  of  the  forces  of  McDowell,  Banks, 
and  Fremont.  Pope,  spurred  thereto  by  Stanton  and  Benjamin 
Wade  (the  chairman  of  the  Congressional  committee  on  the 
conduct  of  the  war),  issued  a  pompous  proclamation,  reflect- 
ing on  the  valor  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  and  beginning: 
"I  have  come  to  you  from  the  West,  where  we  have  always  seen 
the  backs  of  our  enemies,  from  an  army  whose  business  it  has 
been  to  seek  the  adversary  and  beat  him  when  found.  ...  It 
is  my  purpose  to  do  so,  and  that  speedily."  It  proved,  however, 
not  to  be  his  own  program  that  Pope  was  so  bravely  announcing, 
but  Stonewall  Jackson's.  That  wizard  of  strategy  devised 
with  General  Lee  and  successfully  executed  "a  plan  perhaps  the 
most  daring  in  the  history  of  warfare."  Early  in  the  morning 
of  August  25  Jackson  took  25,000  men  (about  half  the  army 
of  Lee  before  Richmond)  with  three  days7  provisions  in  their 
haversacks  and  no  train  except  the  necessary  ambulances  and 
munitions  wagons,  and  started  northwestward  for  a  destina- 
tion which  not  even  his  officers  knew.  "If  silence  is  golden," 
said  one  of  them,  "then  Jackson  is  a  bonanza."  Covering  fifty- 
six  miles  in  two  days,  he  dashed  through  the  Blue  Ridge  at 
Thoroughfare  Gap  and  put  his  force  thirteen  miles  to  the  rear 
of  Pope's  army,  severing  the  Federal  connections  with  Wash- 
ington. He  surprised  Pope's  supply  trains  at  Manassas  Junction 
and  after  appropriating  all  the  bacon,  beef,  pork,  and  flour  that 
his  army  could  use  set  fire  to  the  rest.  By  mysterious  marches 
and  countermarches  he  baffled  the  Union  commanders  until  a 
confusion  of  orders  resulted  in  the  Federal  camp,  and  the  re- 


570  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

enforcements  which  were  coming  to  Pope  from  the  Army  of  the 
Potomac  were  deflected.  At  the  appointed  time  Longstreet 
brought  up  the  rest  of  the  Confederate  army  through  the  gap 
in  the  mountains  which  Pope  had  inexcusably  left  unguarded, 
and  the  two  Southern  generals  united  their  armies  in  the  very 
face  of  their  foe.  The  battle  which  followed  on  the  old  field 
of  Bull  Run,  August  29  and  30,  saw  the  Federal  forces,  though 
superior  in  numbers,  completely  outgeneraled,  defeated,  and 
driven  back  in  rout  to  the  protection  of  the  fortifications  of 
Washington.  Pope  was  relieved  of  his  command,  and  the  Army 
of  Virginia  was  absorbed  into  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  under 
its  old  leader  McClellan.1 

This  summer  of  disaster  to  the  Federal  arms  in  Virginia 
wiped  out  the  joy  over  the  victories  of  Grant  and  Farragut 
in  the  spring.  A  strong  tide  of  reaction  set  in  against  Lincoln's 
government.  The  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men  and  the  mil- 
lions of  dollars  which  had  been  so  generously  furnished  to 
preserve  the  Union  seemed  to  have  been  wasted.  Men  were 
beginning  to  declare  openly  that  the  defeat  of  the  South  was  im- 
possible. Political  strife  revived.  The  Democrats  who  had  sup- 
ported Lincoln  in  1861  deserted  the  administration  in  1862. 
The  cabinet  threatened  to  dissolve  in  faction.  The  President 
was  harassed  on  every  side :  distressed  by  the  military  failures, 

1  Although  Pope  was  incapable  of  dealing  with  such  genius  as  Lee's  and 
Jackson's,  it  must  be  said  that  he  worked  under  severe  handicaps.  His  superior, 
Halleck, — fussy,  irritable,  incompetent,  and  conceited, — attempted  to  direct  the 
campaign  by  telegraph  from  his  office  chair  in  Washington.  Furthermore,  Pope's 
officers  and  men,  alienated  by  his  proclamation,  never  gave  him  that  hearty 
confidence  which  made  the  morale  of  the  Confederates  under  their  adored  com- 
manders Lee,  Jackson,  Longstreet,  and  the  Hills  so  perfect.  It  was  even  be- 
lieved that  the  officers  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  were  half  willing  to  see 
Pope  fail.  Porter,  one  of  McClellan's  corps  commanders,  was  court-martialed 
for  not  obeying  an  order  of  Pope's,  and  the  case  for  his  rehabilitation  dragged 
on  till  the  summer  of  1886.  He  had  written  just  before  the  battle:  "I  believe 
the  enemy  have  a  contempt  for  the  Army  of  Virginia.  I  wish  myself  away  from 
it  with  all  our  old  Army  of  the  Potomac,  and  so  do  our  companions."  It  is 
said  that  the  soldiers  of  General  Franklin  (another  of  McClellan's  officers) 
taunted  Pope's  troops  as  they  fled  from  the  field,  "jeered  at  the  new  route  to 
Richmond,"  and  made  no  secret  of  their  glee  at  the  downfall  of  McClellan's 
rival"  (Rhodes,  Vol.  IV,  p.  135). 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  571 

scolded  by  Greeley  for  not  emancipating  the  slaves,  scored  for 
his  "despotism"  in  suspending  the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus  and 
inflicting  military  punishments  on  civilians.  On  the  other  side 
of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  hope  was  high.  It  was  "the  one  brief 
space  in  Confederate  history  that  was  pure  sunshine."  The 
Southern  agents  in  Europe  were  confident  that  England  and 
France  were  on  the  point  of  interceding  in  their  behalf.  Pres- 
ident Davis  felt  that  the  moment  had  come  to  launch  the 
movement  which  should  drive  the  Federal  armies  out  of  the 
Southland  and  establish  the  independence  of  the  Confederacy. 
A  great  triple  offensive  was  planned.  Lee's  victorious  army  was 
to  invade  Maryland,  delivering  the  "sister  state"  of  the  South 
from  Federal  domination,  threatening  the  Northern  capital,  and 
encouraging  the  defeat  of  the  administration  in  the  autumn 
elections.  Braxton  Bragg,  who  had  succeeded  Beauregard,  was 
to  expel  the  Union  army  from  Kentucky.  And  Van  Dorn  was 
to  clear  the  troops  of  Rosecrans  and  Grant  out  of  Mississippi 
and  Tennessee  and  regain  control  of  the  great  river.  Before  the 
autumn  frosts  tinged  the  maples  the  triple  plan  was  defeated 
at  every  point,  and  the  Confederates  were  thrown  back  on  the 
defensive. 

Lee  crossed  the  Potomac  on  September  4,  publishing  a  procla- 
mation that  he  had  come  to  the  aid  of  the  oppressed  people  of 
Maryland  in  "throwing  off  their  foreign  yoke."  His  army  was 
neither  large  nor  well  supplied,  but  he  counted  on  the  sympathy 
of  the  inhabitants  to  smooth  his  way.  With  the  same  contempt 
for  McClellan's  strategy  as  he  had  shown  for  Pope's,  he  divided 
his  army  in  the  face  of  his  enemy,  sending  Jackson  to  take 
Harpers  Ferry  from  its  12,000  defenders  while  he  himself  pro- 
ceeded to  Sharpsburg  on  Antietam  Creek.  When  McClellan's 
army  was  passing  through  Frederick  City  on  Lee's  heels  a  pri- 
vate from  an  Indiana  regiment  had  the  rare  luck  to  pick  up  a 
dispatch  from  Lee  to  D.  H.  Hill,  revealing  the  whole  plan  of  the 
Confederate  advance.  With  this  information  in  his  possession 
and  with  his  great  superiority  in  numbers,  McClellan  might  have 
destroyed  the  armies  of  Lee  and  Jackson  in  quick  succession; 
but  he  let  the  favorable  moment  slip  by,  as  usual,  and  before  he 


572  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

was  ready  to  attack,  Jackson  had  completed  his  work  and  re- 
joined Lee.  Even  then  McClellan  had  87,000  men  to  oppose  to 
Lee's  55,000  when  the  armies  joined  in  the  terrific  battle  of 
Sharpsburg,  or  Antietam,  on  September  1 7.  All  day  "the  battle 
line  swayed  back  and  forth  like  a  rope  in  adverse  currents," 
and  at  nightfall  Lee  still  held  his  ground.  The  next  morning, 
yielding  to  the  advice  of  his  generals  and  convinced  that  he  had 
nothing  to  hope  from  the  people  of  Maryland,  he  withdrew  his 
forces  unmolested  to  the  southern  side  of  the  Potomac.  Tech- 
nically Sharpsburg  was  a  victory  for  McClellan,  and  he  con- 
gratulated himself  on  it  as  "a  masterpiece  of  art."  But  in 
reality  he  had  lost  the  opportunity  to  destroy  Lee's  Army  of 
Virginia.  His  tactics  were  wretched.  Instead  of  directing  the 
battle  himself,  he  left  it  largely  to  his  corps  commanders,  with 
the  result  of  a  succession  of  unrelated  attacks.  Obsessed  by 
his  persistent  bogy  of  the  preponderance  of  the  Confederate 
forces,  he  held  nearly  one  third  of  his  magnificent  army  in  re- 
serve during  the  entire  battle.  To  be  sure,  the  immediate  object 
of  the  battle  had  been  gained  by  McClellan :  Lee's  invasion  of 
the  North  had  been  checked.1  But  the  discouraging  fact  re- 
mained that  Lee  had  led  back  his  army  intact  (except  for  the 
11,000  who  fell  on  the  field  of  battle)  to  the  Virginia  side  of  the 
Potomac.  After  six  weeks  of  further  procrastination  McClellan 
was  removed  from  command  (November  5),  and  General  Am- 
brose E.  Burnside  was  appointed  in  his  place.2 

1This  fortunate  event  gave  Lincoln  the  opportunity  for  publishing  his  long- 
contemplated  Emancipation  Proclamation,  freeing  the  slaves  in  the  states  or 
parts  of  states  still  in  rebellion  against  the  Federal  government  (September  22). 

2  Burnside  was  a  brave  soldier  and  a  gallant  officer,  but  he  lacked  the  gifts 
of  field  marshal.  He  knew  that  he  was  unequal  to  the  command  of  the  great 
Army  of  the  Potomac,  and  he  had  twice  refused  the  offer  of  it  before  he 
received  the  order  which  he  felt  he  had  no  right  to  disobey.  Substituting  reck- 
lessness for  McClellan's  overcaution,  he  delivered  a  frontal  attack  on  the  Con- 
federates' magnificently  fortified  position  on  the  heights  above  Fredericksburg 
on  the  Rappahannock  (December  13)  and  was  repulsed  with  fearful  loss.  He 
sent  his  men  to  certain  death  like  sheep  to  the  slaughter,  persisting  in  the  charge 
against  the  advice  of  his  best  corps  commanders.  In  January  he  was  relieved 
of  his  command,  but  he  never  could  be  relieved  of  the  memory  of  "those  men 
over  there,"  who  had  marched  against  a  wall  of  fire  at  his  rash  command. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  573 

At  the  moment  Lee  crossed  the  Potomac  into  Maryland, 
Confederate  armies  under  Kirby  Smith  and  Braxton  Bragg 
were  moving  northward  into  Kentucky.  Smith,  capturing  Lex- 
ington and  marching  to  within  four  miles  of  the  Ohio,  threw 
the  city  of  Cincinnati  into  a  panic.  Bragg,  following  a  few  days 
later  from  eastern  Tennessee,  entered  Kentucky,  as  Lee  had 
entered  Maryland,  with  a  proclamation  offering  the  inhabitants 
the  opportunity  to  shake  off  the  yoke  of  "the  Abolitionist  ty- 
rant" and  "be  restored  to  the  freedom  inherited  from  their 
fathers."  He  took  20,000  stands  of  arms  for  recruits,  but  the 
Kentuckians  did  not  flock  to  his  banners.  Buell  meantime  had 
moved  south  to  accomplish  Lincoln's  pet  plan  of  succoring  the 
Unionists  in  eastern  Tennessee  and  capturing  Chattanooga  if 
possible.  Bragg  had  a  clear  way  open  to  Louisville,  and  had  he 
moved  with  decision  and  speed  he  might  have  taken  the  poorly 
defended  city.  But,  discouraged  by  the  hostile  attitude  of  the 
Kentuckians,  he  paused  and  turned  aside,  allowing  Buell  to 
beat  him  in  the  race  to  Louisville.  Strengthening  the  fortifica- 
tions of  the  city  and  gathering  reinforcements,  Buell  turned 
south  again,  in  pursuit  of  Bragg.  The  armies  met  on  October  8 
at  Perryville.  After  a  sharp  engagement  Bragg  retired  toward 
the  Tennessee  border. 

Buell,  like  McClellan,  was  slow  and  overcautious  on  the 
offensive.  Political  influence  had  long  been  working  against 
him,  and  late  in  October  he  was  replaced  by  Rosecrans.  For 
more  than  two  months  Bragg  and  Rosecrans  lay  facing  each 
other  in  Tennessee,  while  the  bold  Confederate  raiders  Morgan, 
Forrest,  and  Joe  Wheeler  wrought  much  damage  on  railroads, 
bridges,  and  supply  depots.  Finally,  on  the  day  after  Christmas, 
when  the  North  was  plunged  in  gloom  over  Burnside's  terrible 
defeat  at  Fredericksburg,  Rosecrans  moved  from  his  quarters  at 
Nashville  to  attack  the  Confederates  encamped  near  Murfrees- 
boro.  The  armies  on  both  sides  were  fairly  matched  and  the 
losses  heavy.  On  the  night  of  January  2,  1863,  Bragg  re- 
treated from  Murfreesboro,  and  President  Lincoln  telegraphed 
to  Rosecrans,  "God  bless  you! "  Neither  Perryville  nor  Mur- 
freesboro could  fairly  be  called  a  Union  victory  on  the  field,  yet, 


574  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

like  McClellan's  more  brilliant  action  at  Sharpsburg,  they  ac- 
complished the  main  purpose  of  frustrating  the  Confederate 
advance.  Bragg  was  thrown  back  on  Chattanooga,  in  the  ex- 
treme southeastern  corner  of  Tennessee,  and,  except  for  Hood's 
desperate  dash  on  Nashville  two  years  later,  the  Confederates 
made  no  further  attempt  to  win  the  two  great  states  of  the 
Middle  West  south  of  the  Ohio.1 

The  new  year  brought  little  comfort  to  either  side.  The 
failure  of  their  triple  advance  was  perhaps  the  least  of  the 
South's  misfortunes.  The  blockade  was  beginning  to  produce 
the  misery  which  was  to  grow  more  and  more  acute  during  the 
last  two  years  of  the  war.  Rations  were  reduced.  Shoes,  blankets, 
and  medicines  were  lacking.  The  transportation  system  broke 
down,  because  supplies  for  the  maintenance  of  the  railroads 
were  not  available.  A  Conscription  Act  of  April,  1862,  which 
had  called  to  the  colors  all  the  white  men  between  the  ages  of 
eighteen  and  thirty-five,  was  bitterly  resisted.  Papers  like  the 
Charleston  Mercury  and  the  Richmond  Examiner  attacked 
Jefferson  Davis  as  incompetent  and  despotic.  The  old  states 
of  the  seaboard,  where  the  doctrine  of  states'  rights  was  strong, 
arrayed  themselves  against  "the  violations  of  constitutional 
law  by  the  supreme  government."  North  Carolina  demanded 
the  return  of  her  volunteers  for  the  defense  of  the  state,  like  the 
New  England  governments  in  the  War  of  1812.  The  conven- 
tion in  South  Carolina  proposed  to  forbid  the  Confederate 
government  to  raise  troops  in  the  state  except  by  voluntary  en- 
listment. Governor  Brown  of  Georgia  defied  President  Davis, 
as  Governor  Troup  had  defied  President  Adams  thirty-six  years 
before.  The  Confederate  legislature  demanded  the  dismissal 
of  the  Secretary  of  War,  Judah  P.  Benjamin.  And,  finally,  the 
high  hopes  of  the  South  for  British  and  French  intervention 
began  to  wane  with  the  publication  of  the  Emancipation  Procla- 
mation and  the  failure  of  the  Confederate  arms  in  Maryland 
and  Kentucky. 

1The  third  part  of  the  general  Confederate  offensive  in  the  autumn  of  1862 
was  foiled  when  Generals  Price  and  Van  Dorn,  in  a  spirited  two  days'  battle 
(October  3  and  4) ,  failed  to  dislodge  General  Rosecrans  from  Corinth,  Mississippi. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  575 

At  the  North  despondency  was  profound.  The  almost  un- 
relieved misfortune  of  the  Union  army  in  Virginia,  culminating 
in  the  awful  disaster  of  Fredericksburg,  had  strengthened  the 
belief  of  thousands  of  men  from  Maine  to  Minnesota  that  it 
was  impossible  to  subdue  the  South.  The  " Copperheads"  came 
to  the  fore  with  their  demands  for  the  immediate  cessation  of 
the  war.  Their  leader,  Vallandigham  of  Ohio,  harangued  the 
House  of  Representatives :  "You  have  not  conquered  the  South ; 
you  never  will.  The  war  for  the  Union  is  in  your  hands  a  most 
bloody  and  costly  failure.  .  .  .  Money  you  have  expended  with- 
out limit,  and  blood  poured  out  like  water.  .  .  .  Defeat,  debt, 
taxation,  and  sepulchres — these  are  your  only  trophies."  Gov- 
ernor Morton  of  Indiana  telegraphed  to  Secretary  Stanton  that 
the  legislatures  of  Indiana  and  Illinois  contemplated  passing  a 
" joint  resolution  acknowledging  the  Southern  Confederacy  and 
urging  the  states  of  the  Northwest  to  dissolve  all  constitutional 
relations  with  the  New  England  states."  "By  a  common  in- 
stinct," wrote  Joseph  Medill  of  Chicago,  "everybody  feels  that 
the  war  is  drawing  to  a  disastrous  and  disgraceful  termination. 
Money  cannot  be  supplied  much  longer  to  a  beaten,  demoralized, 
and  homesick  army.  Sometimes  I  think  that  nothing  is  left  now 
but  to  fight  for  a  boundary."  The  expenses  of  the  government 
had  risen  to  $2,500,000  a  day,  of  which  less  than  one  quarter 
was  realized  from  the  customs  duties  and  taxes.  The  armies  of 
Grant  and  Sherman  tried  in  vain  during  the  spring  months 
of  1863  to  approach  the  great  stronghold  of  Vicksburg  by  the 
treacherous,  fever-laden  bayous  of  the  Yazoo  swamps;  while 
"Fighting  Joe"  Hooker,  who  had  replaced  Burnside  in  the 
command  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  was  outgeneraled  and 
defeated  by  Lee  and  Jackson  in  the  Virginia  forests  about  Chan- 
cellorsville  (May  2  and  3).1  Volunteering  had  ceased,  and  the 
Federal  Congress  resorted  to  conscription  (March  3,  1863),  as 

^n  the  deepening  twilight  after  the  battle  Stonewall  Jackson  and  a  few  of 
his  staff,  who  had  ridden  far  in  advance  of  the  line,  were  mistaken  by  Confed- 
erate sharpshooters  for  a  group  of  Federal  cavalry  and  fired  upon.  Jackson  was 
mortally  wounded,  and  his  death  was,  in  the  opinion  of  many  men  of  the  South, 
the  loss  of  the  war. 


576  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  Confederate  Congress  had  done  a  year  earlier.  This  Con- 
scription Act  and  an  act  of  the  same  day  authorizing  President 
Lincoln  to  suspend  the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus  wherever  he  saw 
fit  provoked  redoubled  criticism  of  the  laboring  administration. 
While  the  draft  was  resisted  desertions  multiplied.  Civilian 
clothing  was  smuggled  into  the  lines  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac 
by  the  carloads  to  encourage  the  slackers  to  leave  the  ranks. 

The  turning-point  of  the  war  came  in  the  opening  days  of 
July,  1863,  with  the  repulse  of  Lee's  second  invasion  of  the 
North  at  Gettysburg  and  with  the  fall  of  the  Confederate  strong- 
hold of  Vicksburg.  Many  considerations  urged  Lee  to  cross  the 
Potomac  again  to  fight  on  Union  soil.  The  morale  of  his  army 
of  75,000  men  was  at  its  peak.  After  the  victories  of  Freder- 
icksburg  and  Chancellorsville  the  Army  of  Virginia  felt  itself 
to  be  invincible.  Furthermore,  Lee,  who  was  a  close  student  of 
public  opinion  in  the  North,  believed  that  the  moment  was 
opportune  to  encourage  the  Copperheads  in  their  resistance  to 
Lincoln's  government.  What  possibilities  there  were  in  a  vic- 
tory on  Northern  soil !  It  would  throw  panic  into  the  capital 
and  the  great  commercial  cities  of  the  seaboard,  close  the  vaults 
of  the  New  Yorjc  bankers  to  Secretary  Chase's  appeal  for  funds,1 
divert  Grant  and  Sherman  from  the  siege  of  Vicksburg,  bring 
the  peace  party  to  the  fore  in  the  North,  and  end  the  war  by  a 
single  blow,  with  the  acknowledgment  of  the  independence  of 
the  South. 

As  Lee's  magnificent  columns,  under  Longstreet,  A.  P.  Hill, 
and  Ewell  (Jackson's  successor),  moved  from  Fredericksburg 
toward  the  Shenandoah  Valley,  Hooker  followed  on  "interior 
lines,"  keeping  to  the  east  of  the  Blue  Ridge.  Ewell  pressed 
ahead  rapidly  until  by  the  end  of  June  his  cavalry  were  within 
three  or  four  miles  of  Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania,  and  his  artil- 
lery shook  the  buildings  of  the  town.  From  Pittsburgh  to 
Philadelphia  terrifying  rumors  spread  that  Lee  with  250  guns 
was  shelling  Harrisburg — that  he  was  marching  on  Philadelphia 
with  100,000  men.  Lincoln  called  out  the  militia  from  Ohio, 

1  Chase  had  just  inaugurated  the  system  of  national  banks,  which  we  shall 
study  in  the  next  section. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  577 

Pennsylvania,  West  Virginia,  and  Maryland.  The  Democratic 
Governor  Seymour  of  New  York,  who  was  accused  of  Copper- 
headism,  offered  his  support  to  the  limit.  Meanwhile  the  im- 
perious Hooker,  quarreling  with  Halleck  about  the  disposition 
of  the  garrison  at  Harpers  Ferry,  had  offered  his  resignation  in 
a  moment  of  irritation  and  had  been  replaced  (June  27)  by 
General  George  G.  Meade,  a  modest,  tireless  worker  and  a  fine 
disciplinarian,  whose  lack  of  brilliancy  was  atoned  for  by  a  devo- 
tion to  the  cause  which,  as  Grant  remarked  to  Stan  ton,  "  would 
have  led  him  to  resign  his  general's  commission  if  ordered,  and 
fall  into  the  ranks  without  a  murmur." 

Meade's  rapid  advance  into  Pennsylvania  caused  Lee  to  re- 
call Ewell  from  Harrisburg  and  concentrate  his  whole  force  near 
the  little  town  of  Gettysburg.  On  July  i  the  armies  came  into 
contact,  the  Confederates  defeating  the  Union  left,  commanded 
by  the  gallant  Reynolds,  who  was  killed  on  the  field.  Meade 
sent  forward  Hancock  to  take  his  place,  and  the  line  was  re- 
stored. The  second  day's  fighting  consisted  of  a  number  of 
desperate  but  not  well-coordinated  attacks  of  the  Confederates 
on  both  wings.  The  Unionists  had  a  double  advantage :  They 
were  being  reenforced  hourly,  until  by  the  afternoon  they  had 
some  90,000  men  to  oppose  to  Lee's  70,000.  Moreover,  the  Fed- 
eral position  on  Cemetery  Ridge  was  a  convex  formation,  which 
allowed  easier  transfer  of  troops  behind  the  lines  than  did  the 
concave  front  of  Seminary  Ridge,  occupied  by  the  Confederates. 
On  the  third  day  of  the  battle  (July  3)  Lee  decided  to  attack 
the  Union  center.  In  vain  Longstreet  remonstrated  with  his 
chief  against  sending  the  men  to  certain  death — infantry  against 
batteries,  "over  nearly  a  mile  of  open  ground  under  the  rain  of 
canister  and  shrapnel."  "The  enemy  is  there,  General  Long- 
street,  and  I  am  going  to  strike  him,"  was  Lee's  quiet  answer. 
General  Pickett's  division  of  15,000  Virginians,  the  flower  of  the 
Confederate  army,  was  selected  for  the  attack.  About  three 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon,  "with  banners  flying  and  with  the 
steadiness  of  a  dress  parade,"  the  magnificent  columns  swept 
down  the  slopes  of  Seminary  Ridge  into  the  valley.  When  they 
had  crossed  half  the  fourteen  hundred  yards  that  separated  the 


578  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

battle  lines,  the  heavy  Union  artillery  opened  fire  on  them,  mow- 
ing great  gaps  in  their  ranks.  On  they  went  unfaltering,  until 
their  thinning  columns  came  within  range  of  Hancock's  shel- 
tered infantry.  Still  on  and  up  the  hill  they  went,  against  a 
wall  of  flame.  A  hundred  men  with  the  gallant  Armistead 
scaled  the  Union  fortifications  and,  driving  the  gunners  from 
their  posts,  planted  the  Confederate  colors  within  their  lines — 
the  high-water  mark  of  the  Confederacy.  But  the  ordeal  was 
greater  than  flesh  and  blood  could  bear.  The  attacking  line 
halted,  bent  slowly  backward,  then  broke  and  fled — what  there 
was  left  of  it — through  the  valley  of  death  to  the  shelter  of  its 
own  guns.1 

Like  a  gambler,  Lee  had  staked  all  on  a  desperate  throw — 
and  lost.  With  unfailing  magnanimity  he  took  all  the  blame 
on  himself  and  had  no  words  but  praise  for  his  officers  and 
men.  On  the  night  of  the  Fourth  of  July  he  began  his  retreat 
to  the  Potomac  through  a  dismal  rain.  The  river,  swollen  by 
floods,  held  him  on  the  Maryland  side  for  several  days,  during 
which  he  was  apprehensive  of  an  attack  by  the  victorious  Union 
army.  Meade  himself  favored  and  planned  such  an  attack, 
but  was  dissuaded  by  the  advice  of  five  of  his  six  corps  comman- 
ders. Lincoln  was  greatly  distressed  when  he  learned  that  Lee 
had  crossed  the  Potomac  into  Virginia.  "We- had  them  within 
our  grasp,"  he  said.  "We  had  only  to  stretch  forth  our  hands 
and  they  were  ours."  But  the  case  was  not  so  simple.  The 
Union  army  had  been  severely  handled  in  the  three  days'  fight- 
ing. Reynolds  was  killed.  Hancock  was  severely  wounded. 
The  army  needed  rest,  recuperation,  and  reorganization.  Be- 

1The  Federal  losses  were  23,049,  the  Confederate  28,063.  Lee's  fame  is  so 
deservedly  dear  to  his  fellow  countrymen  that  they  have  often  shrunk  from 
criticizing  his  military  tactics  too  severely.  But  to  his  contemporaries,  and  even 
to  his  associates,  he  was  not  always  inspired.  Longstreet  called  him  "perfect  in 
defensive  warfare  but  over-rash  in  attack."  He  was  certainly  at  fault  in  the  third 
day's  fighting  at  Gettysburg,  as  he  had  been  in  the  frontal  attack  on  McClellan 
at  Malvern  Hill.  Charles  Francis  Adams,  Jr.,  a  cavalry  colonel  in  the  Union 
army  and  a  keen  military  critic,  gives  a  very  unfavorable  opinion  of  Lee's  gen- 
eralship, in  "A  Cycle  of  Adams  Letters"  (W.  C.  Ford,  Ed.),  Vol.  II,  pp.  56,  57. 
After  Gettysburg  Lee  offered  his  resignation,  but  Davis  refused  to  accept  it. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  579 

sides,  Lee,  always  masterly  on  the  defensive,  had  chosen  and 
fortified  his  position  well  on  the  banks  of  the  Potomac. 

The  retreat  of  the  rain-soaked  Confederates  from  Gettys- 
burg would  have  been  more  dismal  still  had  they  known  that  on 
the  same  Fourth  of  July  General  Pemberton  had  surrendered 
his  garrison  of  29,500  men  at  Vicksburg,  together  with  170 
cannon  and  50,000  small  arms.  For  the  details  of  the  wonderful 
campaign  of  eight  months  against  the  Mississippi  stronghold 
the  student  must  read  the  memoirs  of  the  two  great  Union 
commanders,  Grant  and  Sherman.  Baffled  in  his  attempt  to 
approach  the  impregnable  defenses  of  Vicksburg  from  the  north 
and  east  in  the  late  autumn  of  1862,  Grant  shifted  his  opera- 
tions to  the  west  of  the  Mississippi,  where  the  network  of 
bayous,  swollen  by  winter  rains,  made  a  series  of  submerged 
islands  and  peninsulas  with  the  tortuous  course  of  the  river. 
Floundering  through  the  swamps,  swarming  like  waterfowl  to 
the  patches  of  dry  land  for  their  huddled  camps,  battling  with 
malaria  and  pests,  the  army  slowly  gained  the  shore  of  the  river 
below  Vicksburg,  while  Admiral  Porter  ran  his  gunboats  past 
the  batteries  of  the  fortress  and  towed  barges  laden  with  sup- 
plies. On  April  30  Grant  got  his  troops  across  to  the  eastern 
bank  of  the  river  at  Bruinsburg,  about  thirty-five  miles  south 
of  Vicksburg,  and  telegraphed  Halleck  that  he  felt  that  the 
battle  was  "more  than  half  won."  Cutting  loose  from  his  base 
on  the  river  and  living  off  the  country,  Grant  moved  northward 
toward  the  state  capital  of  Jackson,  where  Johnston  was  arriv- 
ing with  15,000  reinforcements  for  Pemberton  from  the  Army 
of  Virginia. 

Driving  Johnston  out  of  Jackson,  and  destroying  the  arsenals 
and  military  stores  in  the  city,  Grant  turned  westward  to  close 
in  upon  Pemberton.  The  Confederates  made  a  valiant  stand 
against  superior  numbers  at  Champion's  Hill  and  the  Big  Black 
River,  but  were  forced  back  to  the  defenses  of  Vicksburg,  where 
the  Union  army  held  them  closely  besieged  in  a  line  of  twenty- 
five  miles  extending  from  Haines's  Bluff  to  Warrenton.  In  the 
eighteen  days  since  he  had  ferried  his  troops  across  the  Missis- 
sippi at  Bruinsburg,  Grant  had  marched  one  hundred  and  eighty 


580  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

miles  through  a  hostile  and  difficult  country,  fighting  the  enemy 
at  every  step.  He  had  captured  the  state  capital,  dispersed 
Pemberton's  reinforcements,  seized  the  Vicksburg  and  Jackson 
railroad,  secured  the  river  approaches  to  Vicksburg  from  north 
and  south,  and  shut  in  an  army  of  40,000  men  behind  the 
frowning  ramparts.  For  six  weeks  the  beleaguered  city  held 
out,  until  the  inhabitants  were  reduced  to  eating  mules  and 
rats.  To  avoid  the  shells  from  Grant's  batteries  on  the  land  and 
Porter's  gunboats  on  the  river,  many  of  the  families  took  refuge 
in  underground  chambers  hewn  in  the  hard  clay  of  the  bluffs. 
When  all  hope  of  relief  from  Johnston  was  gone  and  his  soldiers 
were  staggering  in  the  trenches  from  starvation,  Pemberton 
surrendered. 

The  capture  of  Vicksburg  was  by  far  the  most  momentous 
event  of  the  war.  It  meant  the  opening  of  the  great  river  to 
the  commerce  of  the  whole  Mississippi  Basin.1  It  meant  the 
severance  of  Arkansas,  Louisiana,  and  Texas  from  their  sister 
states  of  the  Confederacy.  But  chief  of  all,  it  meant  the  stop- 
page of  the  most  important  source  of  supplies  for  the  Southern 
armies.  For  not  only  had  large  quantities  of  grain  and  beef 
come  eastward  from  Texas  over  the  "bridge"  of  the  Mississippi 
between  Vicksburg  and  Port  Hudson,  but  with  the  constantly 
tightening  blockade  of  their  own  shores  on  the  Atlantic  and 
the  Gulf,  the  Confederates  had  found  it  convenient  to  get 
arms,  munitions,  medicine,  and  other  articles  from  Europe  via 
the  Mexican  ports,  whence  they  had  been  smuggled  across  the 
boundary  into  Texas  and  so  over  the  famous  "bridge."  The 
blockade  was  the  first  step,  and  the  recovery  of  the  Mississippi 
the  second,  in  that  process  of  starving  out  the  South  which 
counted  for  more  than  the  victories  on  the  battlefield  in  the 
final  collapse  of  the  Confederacy. 

1Port  Hudson,  Louisiana,  a. smaller  river  stronghold  about  one  hundred  and 
twenty-five  miles  below  Vicksburg,  was  besieged  by  the  Union  general  Banks. 
When  its  commander,  General  Gardner,  heard  of  the  fall  of  Vicksburg,  he  sur- 
rendered his  garrison  of  5000  men,  July  9.  Just  one  week  later  the  steamer 
Imperial,  from  St.  Louis,  anchored  with  a  cargo  of  merchandise  at  New  Orleans. 
Lincoln  wrote  in  August  to  a  mass  meeting  in  his  home  town  of  Springfield, 
Illinois,  "  The  Father  of  Waters  again  goes  unvexed  to  the  sea." 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  581 

"Gettysburg  and  Vicksburg  ought  to  have  ended  the  war," 
says  Rhodes  (Vol.  IV,  p.  3 19) .  There  was  plenty  of  fight  left  in 
the  Southern  armies,  to  be  sure,  but  it  was  henceforth  a  fight  of 
desperation — the  spirit  of  "the  last  ditch."  President  Davis 
kept  to  the  last  his  nervous  confidence  in  the  favorable  outcome 
of  the  struggle,  and  the  Southern  press,  minimizing  the  impor- 
tance of  Vicksburg  and  calling  Gettysburg  "a  drawn  battle," 
insisted  with  redoubled  assurance  on  the  eventual  victory  of  the 
Confederacy.  The  generals  in  the  field  knew  better.  "Dick" 
Taylor,  one  of  the  best  of  them,  declared  that  after  the  cam- 
paign of  1864  opened  "the  commanders  .  .  .  fought  simply  to 
afford  statesmanship  an  opportunity  to  mitigate  the  sorrows  of 
inevitable  defeat,"  and  George  Gary  Eggleston,  in  "A  Rebel's 
Recollections,"  said,  "We  all  knew  from  the  beginning  of  1864 
that  the  war  was  hopeless."  Confederate  bonds,  which  had 
been  bought  in  large  quantities  in  England  and  France,  sank  to 
one  fifth  of  their  par  value.  The  tone  of  the  British  press  and 
of  most  of  the  influential  men  in  Parliament,  which  had  been 
favorable  to  the  South,  began  to  change.1  Napoleon  III  de- 
sisted from  his  efforts  to  bring  about  a  recognition  of  the  inde- 
pendence of  the  Confederacy  with  British  cooperation.2  The 
hearty  response  of  the  North  to  calls  for  money  and  men,  and 
the  indorsement  of  the  administration  in  the  elections  of  the 
autumn  of  1863,  showed  that  the  two  great  victories  had  done 
much  to  dispel  the  discouragement  and  disaffection  of  the  second 
year  of  the  war.3 

1  See  the  exultant  letter  written  by  Henry  Adams  from  London  to  his  brother 
Charles  Francis,  Jr.,  on  the  news  of  the  victories  of  Gettysburg  and  Vicksburg 
(July  23)  in  "A  Cycle  of  Adams  Letters"  (W.  C.  Ford,  Ed.),  Vol.  II,  pp.  58 f. 

2  As  early  as  March,  1861,  Mercier,  the  French  minister  at  Washington,  had 
advised  Napoleon  to  recognize  the  Confederacy.    Two  weeks  before  the  battle 
of  Gettysburg,  Slidell,  the  special  Confederate  envoy  to  France,  interviewed  the 
emperor,  who  sanctioned  contracts  for  building  cruisers  for  the  Southern  cause 
at  Bordeaux  and  Nantes.    "You  may  build  the  ships,"  said  Napoleon,  "but  it 
will  be  needful  to  conceal  their  destination  "  (Schouler,  Vol.  VI,  p.  434). 

3 An  interesting  feature  of  the  rejoicing  over  the  victories  was  Lincoln's  proc- 
lamation of  a  day  of  national  thanksgiving,  borrowed  from  the  old  New  England 
festival  of  the  Puritans.  The  precedent  has  been  followed  every  year  since  1863 
by  our  presidents. 


582  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Before  the  close  of  1863  another  major  campaign  resulted 
in  the  capture  of  a  Confederate  position  second  in  importance 
only  to  Vicksburg.  For  six  months  after  his  New  Year's  battle 
at  Murfreesboro,  Rosecrans  had  idly  confronted  Bragg  in  cen- 
tral Tennessee.  Finally,  heeding  the  repeated  exhortations  of 
Halleck,  he  took  the  field  late  in  June  and  by  skillful  strategy 
compelled  Bragg  to  withdraw  across  the  Cumberland  Mountains 
and  the  Tennessee  River  into  the  northwest  corner  of  Georgia. 
Rosecrans  then  occupied  the  town  of  Chattanooga  on  the 
southern  bank  of  the  Tennessee.  But  here  his  strategy  ceased. 
Mistaking  Bragg 's  concentration  in  the  Chickamauga  valley 
for  a  further  retreat  into  Georgia,  Rosecrans  followed  with 
hasty  and  imperfect  formations,  neglecting  to  secure  the  im- 
portant heights  of  Lookout  and  Missionary  Ridge  on  the  south 
side  of  the  river.  He  met  a  furious  attack  of  Bragg's  army  on 
Chickamauga  Creek,  which  broke  his  right  and  center,  chasing 
men  and  officers  (including  Rosecrans  himself)  back  twelve 
miles  to  the  defenses  of  Chattanooga.  Only  Thomas,  "the  Rock 
of  Chickamauga,"  stood  firm  on  the  left  wing  through  the 
afternoon  till  nightfall,  with  his  forces  formed  in  a  horseshoe, 
bearing  the  repeated  onsets  of  Bragg's  whole  line  (September 
20)  and  retiring  at  last  in  good  order  to  join  his  routed  com- 
rades. Bragg  fortified  the  ridges  skillfully  and  held  Rosecrans's 
army  closely  invested  in  Chattanooga,  with  only  a  single  inade- 
quate and  harassed  road  over  the  hills  to  the  northward  for 
his  supplies.  Rations  fell  low,  and  horses  and  mules  died  of 
hunger  by  the  thousands. 

Rosecrans  was  saved  from  Pember ton's  fate  in  Vicksburg 
by  the  prompt  action  of  the  administration.  At  Secretary 
Stan  ton's  urgent  request  16,000  troops  under  Hooker  were  de- 
tached from  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  and  sent  by  rail  via  Wash- 
ington, Indianapolis,  Louisville,  and  Nashville,  reaching  the 
Tennessee  River  some  forty  miles  below  Chattanooga  in  eight 
days.1  Reinforcements  for  Rosecrans  were  sent  also  from 
Grant's  Vicksburg  army,  by  way  of  Memphis,  but  as  the  river 

1This  exploit  is  one  of  the  most  conspicuous  examples  of  the  advantage 
which  the  North  enjoyed  during  the  war  in  its  efficient  railroad  system. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  583 

was  low  and  the  Confederate  cavalry  raiders  had  made  havoc 
with  roads  and  bridges,  these  troops  under  Sherman  did  not 
reach  Chattanooga  until  the  middle  of  November.  Meanwhile 
an  important  change  in  command  had  been  effected.  Grant, 
promoted  to  a  major-generalcy  in  the  regular  army  as  a  reward 
for  his  services  at  Vicksburg,  was  met  in  person  by  Secretary 
Stanton  at  Indianapolis  and  put  in  charge  of  all  the  armies 
between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  Mississippi  north  of  Banks's 
department  of  the  Gulf  States.  He  immediately  replaced  Rose- 
crans  by  the  reliable  Thomas,  to  whom  he  telegraphed  to  hold 
Chattanooga  at  all  hazards  till  help  should  arrive.  Thomas,  with 
characteristic  energy  and  with  the  invaluable  engineering  aid 
of  General  W.  F.  Smith,  set  about  to  secure  lines  of  communica- 
tion down  the  river.  When  Grant  arrived  at  Chattanooga  on 
October  23,  "wet,  dirty,  and  well,"  he  found  the  morale  of  the 
troops  improved  and  hope  revived. 

In  another  month,  with  Sherman's  reinforcements  at  hand, 
Grant  was  able  to  begin  the  brilliant  operations  which  drove 
Bragg's  army  from  its  strong  positions  on  the  heights  south  of 
the  town.  No  more  wonderful  exploits  in  arms  have  been  per- 
formed on  our  soil  than  the  assaults  of  the  three  days  (Novem- 
ber 23-25)  known  as  the  battle  of  Chattanooga,  where  soldiers 
from  the  armies  of  the  Potomac,  the  Cumberland,  and  the  Mis- 
sissippi cooperated  under  the  command  of  the  four  greatest 
Union  generals  of  the  war — Grant,  Sherman,  Sheridan,  and 
Thomas.  On  the  first  day  Thomas's  troops  drove  the  Con- 
federates from  their  first  lines,  and  at  midnight  Sherman  set 
5000  men  across  the  river.  The  next  day  Hooker  led  his  sol- 
diers up  the  slope  of  Lookout  Mountain  through  rain  and  mist, 
fought  the  famous  " battle  above  the  clouds,"  and  planted  the 
Stars  and  Stripes  on  the  topmost  peak.  But  the  greatest  feat 
of  all  was  reserved  for  Thomas's  Cumberland  troops  on  the 
third  day.  Ordered  to  take  the  Confederate  rifle  pits  at  the  base 
of  Missionary  Ridge,  they  refused  to  pause  after  the  work  was 
done,  but  stormed  up  the  broken,  crumbling  face  of  the  ridge 
in  an  uncontrollable  dash,  led  by  the  impetuous  Sheridan,  driv- 
ing the  enemy  from  his  second  line  and  continuing  up  the  rough 


584  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

steeps,  "oblivious  of  the  bristling  rifle  pits  on  the  crest  and  the 
30  cannon  enfilading  every  gully."  Reaching  the  top,  they 
drove  the  astonished  gunners  and  riflemen  before  them  and  sent 
Bragg  down  the  eastern  slope  of  the  ridge  in  full  retreat,  burn- 
ing his  stores  and  bridges  behind  him.  The  victory  of  Chat- 
tanooga made  Tennessee  secure  for  the  Union1  and  left  the 
North  only  the  task  of  subduing  the  old  states  of  the  southern 
Atlantic  seaboard.  The  news  of  the  great  victory  reached  the 
Northern  cities  on  the  first  national  Thanksgiving  Day. 

From  the  close  of  the  year  1863  the  nature  of  the  war  was 
changed.  It  ceased  to  be  a  contest  on  anything  approaching 
equal  terms.  The  enormous  resources  of  the  North  in  men  and 
money  were  placed  ungrudgingly  at  the  disposal  of  the  govern- 
ment. Thanks  to  Secretary  Chases's  skillful  financial  manage- 
ment Lincoln  could  speak  in  his  message  of  December,  1863, 
of  "the  prompt  and  full  satisfaction  of  all  demands  on  the 
Treasury."  In  the  summer  of  1863  the  draft  had  been  resisted 
at  many  points  in  the  North,  with  a  terrible  riot  in  New  York 
City  costing  1500  lives.  The  war  had  been  called  a  failure  and 
Lincoln  branded  as  a  "tyrant."2  But  in  1864,  drafts  in  March, 
July,  and  December  for  an  aggregate  of  more  than  1,000,000 
men  were  quietly  and  quickly  met.  By  sheer  weight  of  numbers 
Grant  and  Sherman  bore  down  on  the  diminishing  armies  of 


protection  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  mountain  regions  of  eastern  Ten- 
nessee was  always  a  matter  of  solicitude  to  Lincoln,  but  it  was  not  till  the 
summer  of  1863  that  the  military  situation  allowed  an  army  of  relief  to  be  sent 
to  them.  General  Burnside  occupied  Knoxville  while  Rosecrans  was  forcing  Bragg 
out  of  Tennessee.  After  his  victory  at  Chickamauga,  Bragg  sent  Longstreet  to 
drive  Burnside  out  of  Knoxville,  but  the  Federal  victory  at  Chattanooga  made 
Longstreet's  position  in  the  interior  of  the  state  untenable. 

2  Richard  H.  Dana  wrote  to  Charles  Francis  Adams  on  March  9,  1863:  "As 
to  the  politics  of  Washington,  the  most  striking  thing  is  the  absence  of  personal 
loyalty  to  the  President.  ...  He  has  no  admirers,  no  enthusiastic  supporters, 
none  to  bet  on  his  head.  If  a  Republican  convention  were  to  be  held  tomorrow, 
he  would  not  get  the  vote  of  a  state.  He  does  not  act,  or  talk,  or  feel  like  the 
ruler  of  a  great  empire  in  a  great  crisis.  ...  He  is  an  unutterable  calamity  to 
us  where  he  is.  Only  the  army  can  save  us.  Congress  is  not  a  council  of  state. 
It  is  a  mere  district  representation  of  men  of  district  reputations"  (C.  F.  Adams, 
Jr.,  "Richard  Henry  Dana,"  Vol.  II,  p.  264). 


.      »•    u.»* 

'.         *>Gett 


Campaigns  of  McClellan 

and  Burnside,  1862 
Campaigns  of  Grant,  1864-1865 
Lee's  Antietam  Campaign,  1862 
Lee's  Gettysburg  Campaign.  1863 


THE  WAR  IN  EASTERN  VIRGINIA,  MARYLAND,  AND  PENNSYLVANIA 


586  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Lee  and  Johnston  in  the  seaboard  states  of  the  South,  slowly 
crushing  their  power  of  resistance.  If  there  were  still  spasmodic 
offensives  on  the  part  of  the  South,  like  Morgan's  cavalry  raid 
into  Ohio  or  Early's  dashes  down  the  Shenandoah  Valley  or 
Hood's  desperate  rush  on  Nashville,  they  were  only  the  sudden 
flame  that  shoots  from  a  dying  fire.  Never  after  Chattanooga 
did  the  Southern  armies  advance  as  they  had  advanced  at  Shiloh 
and  the  second  Bull  Run,  at  Sharpsburg,  Murfreesboro,  and 
Gettysburg,  to  achieve  the  victory  that  should  seal  the  inde- 
pendence of  the  Confederacy. 

General  Sherman  wrote  in  1885  that  it  "was  not  till  after 
both  Gettysburg  and  Vicksburg  that  the  war  professionally 
began."  By  which  he  meant  that  only  then  did  the  seasoned 
Union  soldiers,  scientifically  brigaded  and  under  a  unified  com- 
mand, move  steadily  toward  a  preconcerted  goal.  Congress, 
on  the  last  day  of  February,  1864,  revived  the  grade  of  lieu- 
tenant general,  conferred  only  twice  since  Washington's  day, 
and  Lincoln  immediately  appointed  Grant  to  this  lofty  honor, 
which  carried  with  it  the  command,  under  the  president,  of  all 
the  armies  of  the  United  States.  Sherman  took  Grant's  place 
as  leader  of  the  combined  armies  of  the  West.  The  plan  of 
campaign  for  1864  was  simple.  Grant  made  his  headquarters 
with  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  of  which  he  left  Meade  in 
nominal  command.  He  was  ready  on  the  third  of  May  to  cross 
the  Rapidan  and  begin  his  advance  against  Lee's  army  and 
Richmond.  At  the  same  moment  Sherman,  with  the  combined 
armies  of  the  Ohio,  the  Tennessee,  and  the  Cumberland,  com- 
manded by  Schofield,  McPherson,  and  Thomas  respectively, 
moved  from  Chattanooga  into  Georgia,  where  Joseph  E.  John- 
ston had  succeeded  to  Bragg 's  command.  Both  Grant  and 
Sherman  outnumbered  their  opponents  about  two  to  one;  but 
both  needed  decided  advantage  in  men,  for  Grant  was  moving 
in  an  unfamiliar  region  against  an  adversary  who  knew  every 
foot  of  the  land  he  was  defending,  and  Sherman  had  to  protect 
at  every  point  an  ever-lengthening  line  of  railroad  for  his  sup- 
plies. We  need  not  trace  in  detail  the  summer's  campaign  of 
these  two  great  armies  as  they  gradually  closed  in  on  the  Con- 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  587 

federacy  from  the  north  and  west.  For  a  month  Grant  ham- 
mered his  way  toward  Richmond,  sacrificing  tens  of  thousands 
of  men  in  the  battle  of  the  Wilderness  (the  scene  of  Hooker's 
defeat  just  a  year  before),  at  the  " bloody  angle"  of  Spottsyl- 
vania,  and  in  the  reckless  frontal  assault  on  Lee's  strongly  for- 
tified position  at  Cold  Harbor.  "I  intend  to  fight  it  out  on  this 
line  if  it  takes  all  summer,"  he  telegraphed  to  Halleck  after  the 
Wilderness  fight.  But  his  terrible  losses1  led  him  to  change  his 
plan.  Avoiding  the  strong  defenses  of  Richmond,  he  trans- 
ferred his  army  to  the  James,  twenty  miles  below  the  city,  and 
laid  siege  to  the  important  railroad  junction  of  Petersburg.  An 
unsuccessful  attempt  to  enter  Petersburg  through  a  breach  in 
the  fortifications  (the  famous  "crater")  made  by  the  explosion 
of  a  huge  mine,  on  July  30,  was  the  last  active  offensive  of  the 
Army  of  the  Potomac  for  the  year. 

This  costly  and  ineffective  campaign  of  the  new  lieutenant 
general,  from  whom  rapid  success  was  expected,  brought  mourn- 
ing to  thousands  of  homes  and  discouragement  to  millions  of 
hearts.  July  and  August  were  months  of  almost  unrelieved 
gloom  in  the  North.2  General  Jubal  A.  Early,  operating  against 
inferior  Union  commanders  in  the  Shenandoah  Valley,  crossed 
the  Potomac  and  appeared  before  the  defenses  of  Washington 
on  July  ii.  The  city  was  barely  saved  by  a  detachment  from 
the  Army  of  the  Potomac.  Sherman  was  slowly  advancing  in 
Georgia,  to  be  sure,  but  not  without  severe  checks  too,  like  that 
at  Kenesaw  Mountain,  where  on  June  27  he  sacrificed  3000 
men  in  an  attack  on  Johnston's  trenches.  Admiral  Farragut's 
capture  of  the  forts  in  Mobile  Bay  (the  first  note  of  cheer  in 
the  gloomy  summer)  did  not  come  till  the  twenty- third  of 
August.  Meanwhile  it  looked  as  if  the  administration  might  go 


1  Grant's  losses  from  May  4  to  June  12  were  54,929,  a  number  approximately 
equal  to  Lee's  whole  force  at  the  opening  of  the  campaign.    In  the  assault  at  Cold 
Harbor,  hardly  less  reckless  than  Burnside's  at  Fredericksburg,  Grant  lost  7000, 
with  no  compensating  advantage  gained,  as  he  later  confessed  in  his  "Memoirs." 

2  A  resolution  passed  Congress  on  July  2,  1864,  asking  Lincoln  to  appoint  a 
day  for  humiliation  and  prayer,  to  implore  the  Almighty  "as  the  supreme  ruler 
of  the  world  not  to  destroy  us  as  a  people," 


588  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

down  to  defeat  in  the  presidential  election  under  the  weight  of 
military  failure.  Lincoln  himself  thought  it  "  extremely  prob- 
able" that  he  would  not  be  reflected  and  on  the  very  day  of 
Farragut's  victory  at  Mobile  wrote  down  his  apprehensions  in 
a  secret  memorandum.  The  Democratic  convention,  which  met 
August  29  at  Chicago,  nominated  General  McClellan  for  presi- 
dent and  adopted  a  platform  containing  a  plank  (written  by 
Vallandigham)  to  the  effect  that  " after  four  years  of  failure  to 
restore  the  Union  by  the  experiment  of  war  .  .  .  justice,  hu- 
manity, liberty,  and  the  public  welfare  demand  that  immediate 
efforts  be  made  for  a  cessation  of  hostilities."1 

The  autumn  brought  brighter  hopes  for  the  administration. 
On  September  i  Sherman  entered  Atlanta.  On  October  19 
Sheridan,  by  his  dashing  ride  from  Winchester,  "  twenty  miles 
away,"  turned  the  defeat  of  Cedar  Creek  into  a  magnificent 
victory  and  drove  the  cavalry  of  Early  out  of  the  Shenandoah 
Valley.  In  the  election  which  followed  in  November,  Lincoln 
carried  every  state  except  New  Jersey,  Delaware,  and  Ken- 
tucky, although  McClellan's  minorities  were  large.  The  vote 
in  the  electoral  college  was  212  to  21,  but  the  popular  vote  gave 
Lincoln  less  than  400,000  plurality  in  a  total  of  4,000,000. 

Before  the  year  was  out  two  more  tidings  of  victory  came  from 
the  Union  generals  in  the  South.  Sherman,  cutting  loose  from 
his  base  and  sending  Thomas  back  to  defend  Nashville,  marched 
through  the  rich  fields  of  Georgia  from  Atlanta  to  the  sea,  with 
60,000  men  in  four  columns,  living  off  the  country  and  destroy- 
ing railroads  and  public  buildings  in  a  wide  swath  of  sixty  miles.2 

alt  is  only  fair  to  McClellan  to  say  that  he  repudiated  this  plank,  while 
accepting  the  nomination  of  the  party  which  was  to  "hurl  the  tyrant  Lincoln 
from  his  throne."  McClellan  said  that  he  could  not  look  his  old  comrades  in 
arms  in  the  face  if  he  indorsed  the  sentiment  that  the  war  was  a  failure. 

2  There  has  been  much  controversy  over  the  conduct  of  the  troops,  and 
Sherman  has  been  execrated  as  a  vandal  for  the  damage  wrought  on  this  famous 
march.  Sherman  was  harsh  in  his  determination  that  the  South  should  feel  the 
ravages  of  war.  He  wrote  to  Grant  that  he  would  "make  Georgia  howl."  Yet 
he  and  all  his  officers  asserted  that  no  wanton  damage  was  done  by  official 
orders.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  discipline  was  not  strictly  enforced,  and  camp  fol- 
lowers, "bummers,"  and  negroes  undoubtedly  committed  acts  of  wanton  de- 
struction and  pillage. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  589 

On  the  night  of  December  20  General  Hardee  got  his  garrison  of 
15,000  men  out  of  Savannah  into  South  Carolina  by  a  pontoon 
bridge  across  the  river,  and  Sherman  took  possession  of  the  city, 
with  1 50  heavy  guns  and  plenty  of  ammunition,  and  also  about 
25,000  bales  of  cotton,  which  he  presented  to  Lincoln  as  a 
Christmas  gift.  Meantime  General  Hood,  who  had  replaced 
Johnston  when  Sherman  was  approaching  Atlanta,  left  Georgia 
to  take  care  of  itself  as  best  it  could  and  struck  across  the 
Tennessee  River  to  crush  Thomas.  If  he  succeeded  it  would 
mean  the  undoing  of  Chattanooga,  the  reoccupation  of  Tennes- 
see, and  the  opportunity  for  Hood  with  his  victorious  army  to 
move  eastward  and  cooperate  with  either  the  Confederate  troops 
in  the  Carolinas  or  Lee's  hard-pressed  army  near  Richmond. 
The  anxiety  of  the  men  in  high  position,  from  Lincoln  down 
through  Stanton,  Grant,  and  Halleck,  was  great.  Grant  repeat- 
edly urged  Thomas  to  attack,  and  even  went  so  far  as  to  desig- 
nate General  Logan  to  supersede  him.  But  Thomas  knew  his 
ground  and  coolly  waited  until  he  was  ready.  On  December  1 5 
he  completely  shattered  Hood's  force  before  Nashville.  The 
Southern  army,  which  had  numbered  53,000  when  Johnston  had 
faced  Sherman,  melted  away,  and  Hood  was  relieved  from  the 
service  at  his  own  request. 

The  victories  of  Sherman  and  Thomas  in  December  practi- 
cally brought  the  resistance  of  the  South  to  an  end.  The  spring 
months  of  1865  found  Davis  and  his  Congress  at  odds.  The 
destitution  of  the  Confederacy  could  no  longer  be  concealed. 
Desertions  were  frequent,  food  was  scarce,  Union  money  was 
circulating  in  spite  of  the  prohibition  of  the  government,  and 
negroes  began  to  be  recruited  in  the  armies.  Public  men,  in 
ever-increasing  numbers,  were  convinced  that  further  resistance 
was  hopeless.  A  delegation  headed  by  Alexander  H.  Stephens 
met  Lincoln  and  Seward  at  Hampton  Roads,  February  3,  to  dis- 
cuss terms  for  the  cessation  of  hostilities.  Lincoln  insisted  on 
two  points:  the  restoration  of  the  Union  and  the  abolition  of 
slavery.  The  Southerners  pronounced  his  terms  "unconditional 
submission  to  the  mercy  of  conquerors,"  and  the  conference 
broke  up.  Davis  and  Lee  both  upheld  the  Southern  delegates 


590  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

in  their  refusal  to  abandon  the  independence  of  the  Confed- 
eracy. "I  can  have  no  common  country  with  the  Yankees," 
said  Davis.  "My  life  is  bound  up  with  the  Confederacy.  If 
any  man  supposes  that  under  any  circumstances  I  can  be  an 
agent  of  the  reconstruction  of  the  Union,  he  mistakes  every 
element  of  my  nature.  With  the  Confederacy  I  will  live  or 
die."  Lee  told  his  soldiers  in  a  proclamation  that  their  choice 
was  between  "war  and  abject  submission."  Yet  both  these  men 
lived  to  be  reconciled  to  the  United  States  of  America,  and 
Davis  at  the  close  of  his  history  of  the  Confederacy  wrote  of 
the  Union,  "Esto  perpetual"  The  Southern  leaders  in  the 
spring  of  1865  utterly  misunderstood  Lincoln's  conciliatory 
spirit.  They  used  such  phrases  as  "abject  submission,"  "sub- 
jugation," "our  arrogant  foe,"  when  arrogance  or  revenge  was 
as  far  from  Lincoln's  thoughts  as  the  east  is  from  the  west. 
His  beautiful  second  Inaugural  Address,  delivered  on  March  4, 
breathed  only  magnanimity  in  his  deep  longing  for  a  just, 
kindly,  and  lasting  peace  for  the  war-torn  country,  "with  malice 
toward  none,  with  charity  for  all." 

Yet  it  is  not  strange  that  the  deeds  of  Sherman  spoke  more 
loudly  to  the  South  than  the  words  of  Lincoln.  The  general, 
after  a  brief  stay  in  the  city  of  Savannah,  began  his  march 
northward  through  the  Carolinas — a  march  which  he  calls  in 
his  "Memoirs"  "ten  times  as  important"  as  his  famous  march 
through  Georgia.  Among  officers  and  men  there  was  much 
resentment  against  South  Carolina,  as  the  state  responsible  for 
the  war.  Columbia,  the  state  capital,  was  burned  the  morn- 
ing the  Union  troops  entered  the  city  (February  19).  Although 
the  responsibility  for  the  conflagration  has  not  been  fixed  to 
this  day,  and  evidence  points  strongly  to  its  origin  in  burn- 
ing cotton  fired  by  the  townspeople  themselves,  Sherman  was 
charged  with  the  deed  as  the  culmination  of  his  policy  of  vandal- 
ism. It  is  in  the  light  of  the  flames  of  Columbia  that  the  reply 
of  the  South  to  Lincoln's  terms  of  peace  must  be  read. 

Grant  renewed  active  operations  against  Petersburg  late  in 
March.  His  army  of  116,000  men  gradually  closed  in  upon 
Lee's  force  of  less  than  half  that  number.  On  Sunday,  April  2, 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  591 

a  messenger  from  Lee  brought  to  President  Davis,  as  he  sat  at 
worship  in  St.  Paul's  church,  the  warning  that  Richmond  must 
be  evacuated.  The  Confederate  government  left  the  city  that 
night  for  Danville,  and  the  next  day  Union  troops  entered, 
their  bands  playing  "  Rally  round  the  Flag,  Boys !  "  Lee  tried 
to  get  his  army  to  the  hilly  land  of  western  Virginia,  where  he 
believed  that  he  could  maintain  a  defensive  warfare  for  many 
months  to  come,  but  Sheridan's  cavalry,  spreading  out  along 
the  Appomattox  valley,  headed  him  off,  defeating  his  hungry, 
exhausted  soldiers  at  Five  Forks  and  bringing  him  to  the  bitter 
decision  of  surrender.  Grant  and  Lee  met  at  the  McLean 
farm  at  Appomattox  Court  House,  April  9.  After  a  few  min- 
utes of  friendly  conversation  recalling  their  old  days  of  com- 
radeship in  the  Mexican  War,  Grant  drew  up  to  a  table  and 
wrote  out  in  a  few  sentences  the  liberal  terms  of  surrender. 
All  that  was  asked  was  that  the  soldiers  should  lay  down  their 
arms  and  return  to  their  allegiance  to  the  Union.  The  officers 
were  allowed  to  retain  their  mounts  and  side  arms,  and  the 
cavalry  and  artillerymen,  at  Lee's  request,  were  permitted  to 
keep  their  own  horses,  "to  work  their  farms/'  as  Grant  said 
with  his  wonderful  simplicity.  Lee  immediately  signed  the 
terms,  with  a  gracious  acknowledgment  of  their  generosity. 

The  Army  of  Virginia  had  been  the  mainstay  of  the  Con- 
federacy. With  Lee's  surrender  the  submission  of  the  other 
armies  was  only  a  matter  of  days.  The  surrender  of  Johnston 
to  Sherman  at  Raleigh,  North  Carolina  (April  26),1  and  of 
"Dick"  Taylor's  forces  east  of  the  Mississippi  and  Kirby 
Smith's  west  of  the  river  to  Canby  (May  4  and  26  respectively) 
brought  the  end  of  armed  resistance  to  the  authority  of  the 
United  States.  Nearly  175,000  Confederate  soldiers  laid  down 
their  arms  in  those  spring  weeks  of  1865  and  returned  to  their 

10n  April  18  Sherman  had  entered  into  an  agreement  with  Johnston,  secur- 
ing the  promise  of  the  surrender  of  all  the  Confederate  troops  to  the  Rio  Grande 
in  return  for  political  engagements  as  to  the  treatment  of  the  seceded  states. 
Sherman  transcended  his  competence  as  a  military  commander  in  discussing 
these  political  matters,  and  his  arrangements  were  promptly  disavowed  by  the 
government  at  Washington.  However,  his  intentions  were  good,  and  the  harsh 
censure  meted  out  to  him  by  Stanton  was  unkind  if  not  undeserved. 


592  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

plantations  and  homes  to  begin  the  long  task  of  repairing  the 
ravages  of  war.  They  had  fought  a  valiant  fight.  The  courage 
of  the  men  and  the  self-sacrificing  devotion  of  the  women  re- 
main a  cherished  tradition  in  Dixie  Land.  But  there  are  few, 
if  any,  of  the  children  of  those  who  fought  for  the  "lost  cause " 
who  would  wish  today  that  the  outcome  of  the  Civil  War 
had  been  different — none  who  would  not  now  echo  the  final 
benediction  of  Jefferson  Davis  on  our  common  Union:  "Esto 
perpetua ! " 

GOVERNMENT  AND  PEOPLE  IN  WAR  TIME 

"In  the  clash  of  arms  the  laws  are  silent"  runs  the  old 
Roman  proverb.  War  tends  inevitably  to  increase  the  power 
of  the  executive  arm  of  government,  even  in  democracies.  Quick 
decision,  unity  of  plan,  efficiency  in  action,  are  the  conditions 
of  military  success,  which  ill  tolerates  the  slow  deliberations  of 
a  legislative  body  or  that  insistence  on  the  right  of  free  expres- 
sion of  opinion  which  is  cherished  as  a  fundamental  liberty  by 
self-governing  peoples.  The  United  States  and  the  Confederate 
States  of  America  proved  no  exception  to  this  general  rule  in 
the  Civil  War. 

From  the  fall  of  Fort  Sumter  to  the  meeting  of  the  extra 
session  of  Congress  nearly  three  months  later,  Abraham  Lin- 
coln was  virtually  a  "dictator."  By  executive  proclamation  he 
increased  the  regular  army  and  navy  of  the  United  States  by 
some  40,000  men,  although  he  had  no  constitutional  right  to 
add  a  single  man  to  a  regiment  or  a  ship.  He  proclaimed  a 
blockade  of  the  ports  of  the  cotton  states  and  threatened  with  the 
fate  of  pirates  anyone  who  should  molest  the  commerce  of  the 
United  States,  although  a  blockade  is  an  incident  of  war  and  war 
had  been  neither  declared  nor  recognized.  He  authorized  Gen- 
eral Scott  to  suspend  the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus  and  make  mili- 
tary arrests  anywhere  on  the  line  between  Philadelphia  and 
Washington,  although  the  right  to  suspend  the  writ  is  enumer- 
ated among  the  powers  of  Congress  in  the  Constitution  (Art.  I, 
sect.  9,  par.  2),  and  a  decision  of  Chief  Justice  Marshall  at  the 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  593 

time  of  the  Burr  conspiracy  had  denied  it  to  the  executive. 
When  Congress  met  on  July  4,  Lincoln  confessed  the  unconstitu- 
tionally of  his  proclamations,  which,  he  said,  "were  ventured 
upon  under  what  appeared  to  be  a  popular  demand  and  a  pub- 
lic necessity."  Congress  promptly  and  enthusiastically  ratified 
his  actions.  A  "higher  law"  had  superseded  the  Constitution  — 
the  law  of  self-preservation.  Throughout  the  war  Congress 
cooperated  with  the  President,  conferring  on  him  the  power  to 
suspend  the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus  whenever  and  wherever  he 
deemed  it  necessary  and  allowing  him  great  freedom  in  the  in- 
terpretation and  execution  of  its  acts. 

The  administration  at  Washington  was  hardly  consistent  in 
its  attitude  toward  the  South.  Lincoln  held  to  the  theory  that  the 
seceding  states  had  not  left  the  Union  and  could  not  leave  the 
Union,  but  that  groups  of  men  in  them,  too  numerous  and  pow- 
erful to  be  dealt  with  by  the  civil  authorities,  were  in  insurrec- 
tion against  the  United  States.  To  recognize  the  Confederacy 
as  a  belligerent  power  would  be  virtually  to  concede  that  it  was 
another  "nation,"  and  yet  to  treat  the  Confederate  armies  and 
navies  merely  as  masses  of  individual  "traitors"  would  have 
been  impossible  and  ridiculous.1  Therefore,  while  maintaining 
its  claim  to  sovereignty  over  the  citizens  of  the  seceding  states 
(as  shown,  for  example,  by  the  Nonintercourse  Act  of  July  13, 
1  86  1,  the  Confiscation  Act  of  August  6,  1861,  and  the  exemption 
of  parts  of  the  slaveholding  states  from  the  application  of  the 
Emancipation  Proclamation),  the  government  at  Washington 
virtually  recognized  the  sovereignty  of  the  Confederacy  over 
the  same  citizens  by  according  them  the  status  of  a  belligerent 
power,  with  exchanges  of  prisoners,  paroles,  and  the  reception 
of  overtures  for  peace.  It  was  inconsistency  —  but  the  alter- 
native would  have  been  rank  inhumanity. 


dilemma  was  presented  in  the  autumn  of  1861,  when  the  crew  of  the 
privateer  Savannah  were  brought  as  captives  into  New  York  Harbor.  The  men 
were  convicted  of  piracy,  in  accord  with  Lincoln's  proclamation  of  blockade. 
But  when  President  Davis,  invoking  the  lex  talionis,  threatened  to  treat  an 
equal  number  of  Union  prisoners  in  the  same  way  as  these  men  were  treated, 
the  sentence  was  never  carried  out. 


594  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  policy  of  the  government  in  regard  to  slavery  was  revo- 
lutionized by  the  war.  On  the  day  after  the  battle  of  Bull  Run 
both  Houses  of  Congress,  in  accord  with  the  Republican  plat- 
form and  Lincoln's  repeated  statements,  passed  a  resolution 
that  "this  war  is  not  waged  ...  in  any  spirit  of  oppression, 
or  for  any  purpose  of  conquest  or  subjugation,  or  purpose  of 
overthrowing  or  interfering  with  the  rights  or  established  insti- 
tutions of  those  [seceded]  states,  but  to  defend  and  maintain 
the  supremacy  of  the  Constitution,  and  to  preserve  the  Union 
with  all  the  dignity,  equality,  and  rights  of  the  several  states 
unimpaired ;  that  as  soon  as  these  objects  are  accomplished  the 
war  ought  to  cease."  But  when  it  appeared  that  the  slaves  were 
employed  in  the  Confederate  army,  driving  munition  wagons, 
cooking  in  the  camps,  and  digging  at  the  trenches  and  fortifica- 
tions, a  Confiscation  Act  was  passed  (August  6)  declaring  such 
of  them  as  "were  required  or  permitted  to  work  in  or  upon  any 
fort,  navy  yard,  dock,  armory,  ship,  or  intrenchment  against 
the  lawful  authority  of  the  United  States,"  to  be  forfeited.  This 
act  did  not  go  far  enough  for  those  who  believed  that,  since 
slavery  was  the  cause  of  the  war,  the  extermination  of  slavery 
should  be  the  first  object  of  the  war.  General  Fremont,  com- 
mander of  the  Department  of  the  West,  issued  a  proclamation 
(August  31)  emancipating  the  slaves  of  all  persons  in  Missouri 
in  rebellion  against  the  United  States,  but  Lincoln  ordered  him 
to  modify  the  proclamation  to  accord  with  the  Confiscation 
Act.1  The  President's  great  desire  was  to  win  the  border  states 
to  a  policy  of  compensated  emancipation,  and  to  that  end  he 
secured  the  passage  of  a  bill  in  April,  1862,  offering  to  loyal 
slaveholders  a  maximum  of  $300  for  each  slave.  On  July  14  he 
summoned  the  members  of  Congress  from  the  border  states  to 
the  White  House  to  urge  them  in  person  to  accept  this  offer, 

XA  similar  proclamation  by  General  Hunter  of  the  Department  of  the  South, 
nine  months  later,  emancipated  the  slaves  in  the  states  of  South  Carolina,  Georgia, 
and  Florida.  Lincoln  repudiated  this  order  too,  declaring  that  he  must  reserve 
to  himself  the  responsibility  of  setting  the  slaves  free  in  any  state,  in  his  capacity 
as  commander  in  chief  of  the  army  and  navy. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  595 

but  to  his  bitter  disappointment  they  refused.1  A  week  later 
Lincoln  read  to  his  cabinet  the  draft  of  the  Emancipation  Proc- 
lamation. On  the  wise  advice  of  Seward  he  postponed  issuing 
the  proclamation  until  a  Union  victory  in  the  field  should  give  it 
weight.  Shortly  after  Lee's  invasion  of  Maryland  was  checked 
at  Antietam,  Lincoln  published  the  proclamation  (September 
22 ),  which  announced  that  on  January  i,  1863,  he  would  declare 
"forever  free"  the  slaves  in  all  the  states  which  were  in  arms 
against  the  authority  of  the  Federal  government  on  that  day. 

The  Emancipation  Proclamation  was  not  an  abolitionist  docu- 
ment but  a  military  punishment.  It  did  not  alter  the  actual 
status  of  the  negro  in  the  South,  because  it  applied  to  just  that 
part  of  the  South  where  President  Lincoln's  authority  was  not 
recognized,  and  explicitly  exempted  those  regions  where  it  was 
recognized.  Only  the  conquest  of  the  South  by  arms  actually 
liberated  the  slaves.  Neither  did  the  Proclamation  accomplish 
the  legal  emancipation  of  the  slaves.  Except  where  it  was  done 
by  state  action  (as  in  Missouri,  Maryland,  and  Tennessee)  this 
waited  for  the  ratification  of  the  Thirteenth  Amendment  in 
1865.  If,  then,  the  Emancipation  Proclamation  meant  neither 
the  actual  nor  the  legal  abolition  of  slavery,  one  may  ask  why 
it  should  be  classed  with  the  Declaration  of  Independence  and 
the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  as  one  of  the  "immortal" 
documents  of  our  history.  The  answer  is,  Because  it  was  the  an- 
nouncement that  henceforth  the  war  was  to  be  waged  not  only 
for  the  preservation  of  the  Union  but  also  for  the  permanent 
banishment  of  slavery  from  its  borders.  Congress  had  abolished 
slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia  in  April,  1862,  and  in  all  the 
territories  of  the  United  States  in  June.  From  the  summer  of 
1862  on,  President  Lincoln  made  the  acceptance  of  a  general 
emancipation  program,  as  well  as  the  restoration  of  the  Union, 

1  Unfortunately  the  conference  took  place  in  the  days  of  discouragement  just 
after  McClellan's  failure  before  Richmond.  James  G.  Elaine,  in  his  "Twenty 
Years  of  Congress"  (Vol.  I,  p.  447),  says,  "The  border  state  men,  becoming 
doubtful  of  Union  success,  preferred  to  keep  their  slaves  rather  than  part  with 
them  for  bonds  which  would  soon  become  valueless." 


596  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  sine  qua  non  of  any  terms  of  peace  (see  the  Hampton  Roads 
conference,  p.  sSg1). 

The  effect  of  the  Emancipation  Proclamation  upon  Europe 
was  wholly  favorable  to  the  Union  cause.  Whether  there  should 
be  one  or  two  federations  of  states  between  Canada  and  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico  was  of  little  concern  to  most  of  the  people 
across  the  Atlantic,  but  a  war  to  abolish  slavery  roused  the 
hearty  response  of  all  the  humanitarian  sentiment  among  the 
liberals  of  Great  Britain  and  the  Continent.  A  monster  mass 
meeting,  held  in  Exeter  Hall  in  London,  on  January  29,  1863, 
acclaimed  the  Proclamation  with  cheers.  Addresses  of  congrat- 
ulation came  to  Lincoln  from  antislavery  societies  and  trade- 
unions.  The  workers  of  Manchester,  although  reduced  to 
poverty  by  the  stoppage  of  the  cotton  supply  from  the  Southern 
states,  sent  a  letter  of  sympathy,  to  which  Lincoln  gratefully 
replied  in  his  own  hand. 

At  home,  however,  the  results  of  the  Proclamation  were  dis- 
appointing. It  tended  to  unite  the  South  and  divide  the  North. 
The  Southern  press  cynically  referred  to  it  as  an  attempt  to  stir 
up  hatred  against  the  slaveholder  in  order  to  "atone  for  de- 
feat in  the  field";2  and  malicious  newspapers  represented  the 
language  of  the  Proclamation  as  encouragement  to  negro  insur- 
rection.3 Montgomery  Blair,  the  Postmaster-General,  warned 

1From  the  Emancipation  Proclamation  to  the  end  of  the  war  180,000  negroes 
were  enlisted  in  the  Northern  armies  and  fought  with  conspicuous  bravery.  The 
Confederate  Congress,  on  May  i,  1863,  passed  a  resolution  to  the  effect  that 
"every  white  person  being  a  commissioned  officer  .  .  .  who  shall  command 
negroes  or  mulattoes  in  arms  against  the  Confederate  States  .  .  .  shall  be  deemed 
as  inciting  servile  insurrection,  and  shall  if  captured  be  put  to  death  or  be 
otherwise  punished  at  the  discretion  of  the  court."  Yet  toward  the  end  of  the 
war  Jefferson  Davis  himself  advised  the  Southerners  to  enroll  their  slaves  "as  an 
alternative  to  subjugation."  General  Lee  approved  the  plan,  believing  that 
the  negroes  could  be  made  "efficient  soldiers,"  and  on  March  13, 1865,  an  act  of 
the  Confederate  Congress  provided  for  the  "enlistment  of  colored  people."  The 
war  ended  before  there  were  actually  any  negro  regiments  in  the  Southern  armies. 

2  The  autumn  of  1862  was  the  period  of  the  brightest  hopes  of  the  South. 
It  was  in  the  very  month  of  the  Proclamation  that  the  great  triple  offensive 
was  launched  by  the  Confederate  armies  (see  page  571). 

3 A  clause  in  the  document  read,  "The  executive  government  of  the  United 
States,  including  the  military  and  naval  authorities  thereof,  will  recognize  and 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  597 

Lincoln  that  the  Proclamation  "  would  cost  the  administration 
the  autumn  elections."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  Democrats  did 
carry  the  important  states  of  New  York,  Ohio,  Pennsylvania, 
Indiana,  Illinois,  and  Wisconsin,  all  of  which  had  gone  for 
Lincoln  in  1860,  and  gained  32  seats  in  the  House  of  Represent- 
atives. A  narrow  majority  in  Congress  was  saved  for  the  admin- 
istration only  by  the  return  of  a  solid  Republican  delegation 
from  Maryland,  Missouri,  and  Kentucky,  where  the  voting  was 
conducted  under  the  supervision  of  Federal  troops.  But  it  is 
impossible,  as  is  generally  the  case  in  American  elections,  to  say 
how  far  the  result  was  due  to  a  single  issue.  There  were  causes 
enough  for  a  Republican  reverse  at  the  polls  in  the  autumn  of 
1862  besides  the  Emancipation  Proclamation:  military  arrests, 
the  suppression  of  free  speech,  the  suspension  of  the  writ  of 
Habeas  Corpus,  the  failure  of  McClellan  in  the  Peninsular  cam- 
paign, the  withdrawal  of  Lee's  army  intact  from  Maryland  and 
of  Bragg's  from  Kentucky.1 

The  first  step  in  the  process  which  was  to  make  the  abolition 
of  slavery  final  and  legal  was  taken  on  December  14, 1863,  when 
the  fortunes  of  the  North  had  been  repaired  by  the  victories 
of  Gettysburg,  Vicksburg,  and  Chattanooga.  Representative 
Ashley  of  Ohio  introduced  into  the  House  a  Thirteenth  Amend- 
ment to  the  Constitution,  prohibiting  slavery  within  the  United 
States  or  any  place  subject  to  their  jurisdiction.  A  test  vote  in 
the  House  failed  to  secure  the  two  thirds  necessary  for  adoption, 
and  the  matter  rested  there  until  the  next  meeting  of  Congress, 
in  December,  1864.  Farragut  had  captured  the  forts  of  Mobile 
Bay,  Lincoln  had  been  triumphantly  reflected,  and  Sherman 
had  completed  his  famous  march  to  the  sea  by  the  occupation 

maintain  the  freedom  of  such  persons  [slaves]  ...  in  any  efforts  they  may 
make  for  their  actual  freedom."  The  London  Saturday  Review,  violently  pro- 
Southern,  said,  "The  American  law-giver  not  only  confiscates  his  neighbors' 
slaves,  but  orders  those  slaves  to  cut  their  masters'  throats." 

1  Indeed,  it  was  the  opinion  of  men  like  Grimes  of  Iowa  and  Sumner  of 
Massachusetts  that  the  Emancipation  Proclamation  had  actually  saved  the  ad- 
ministration from  defeat  in  the  elections  of  1862.  "We  made  the  Proclamation 
an  issue,"  wrote  Grimes  to  Chase,  "and  carried  the  state  (Iowa)  by  bringing 
the  radical  electorate  up  to  the  polls," 


598  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

of  Savannah  when  the  momentous  measure  came  before  the 
House  for  the  final  roll  call,  on  the  afternoon  of  January  31, 
1865.  The  yeas  were  119,  the  nays  56.  When  the  vote  was 
announced  the  members  rose  from  their  seats  cheering  wildly, 
while  the  crowded  galleries  answered  with  equally  jubilant  de- 
fiance of  parliamentary  rules.  In  honor  of  the  great  event  the 
House  immediately  adjourned.  The  Thirteenth  Amendment 
was  ratified  during  the  year  by  the  legislatures  of  three  fourths 
of  the  states  and  proclaimed  in  force  in  December.  The  cancer 
which  for  generations  had  been  feeding  on  the  strength  of  the 
Republic  and  for  more  than  a  decade  threatening  the  life  of  the 
Union  was  finally  removed  by  the  dreadful  surgery  of  civil  war. 
Both  President  Lincoln  and  President  Davis  had  to  endure 
a  vast  amount  of  opposition  from  their  own  sections  dur- 
ing the  Civil  War.  Lincoln's  deliberation  was  interpreted  as 
vacillation,  his  poise  as  baffled  confusion,  and  his  silence  as  a 
confession  of  political  and  military  bankruptcy.  In  the  same 
breath  he  was  ridiculed  as  a  " Simple  Susan"  and  denounced 
as  a  "tyrant."  The  strict  constitutionalist  was  offended  by  his 
assumption  of  "despotic"  power  in  suspending  the  writ  of  Ha- 
beas Corpus  and  making  military  arrests.  The  men  who  were 
more  concerned  for  the  preservation  of  their  personal  liberty 
than  for  the  preservation  of  the  Union  resented  the  arbitrary 
proclamations  interfering  with  the  freedom  of  speech  and  ac- 
tion.1 The  extreme  abolitionists  thought  that  the  South,  cursed 
with  slavery,  was  not  worth  keeping  in  the  Union — espe- 
cially at  the  cost  of  rivers  of  blood  and  unlimited  treasure.  The 
more  moderate  abolitionists  scolded  Lincoln  for  repudiating  the 
proclamations  of  Fremont  and  Hunter  and  for  not  making 
the  war  from  the  beginning  a  crusade  against  slavery.2  The 

1  Especially  the  drastic  proclamation »of  September  24,  1862,  subjecting  to  mil- 
itary arrest,  imprisonment  without  bail  or  privilege  of  the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus, 
and  trial  by  court-martial  of  all  persons  "discouraging  volunteer  enlistments, 
resisting  military  drafts,  or  guilty  of  any  disloyal  practice,  or  affording  any  aid 
and  comfort  to  rebels  against  the  United  States." 

2 Horace  Greeley's  editorial  entitled  "The  Prayer  of  Twenty  Millions,"  in 
the  New  York  Tribune  of  August  20,  1862,  was  the  most  conspicuous  example 
of  the  pressure  brought  to  bear  on  Lincoln  to  declare  immediate  emancipation. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  599 

Copperheads,  like  the  secessionists,  protested  against  the  "coer- 
cion" and  " subjugation"  of  " sovereign  states."  The  slacker  re- 
sented the  Conscription  Act  of  March  3,  1863,  and  resisted  the 
draft.1 

Even  Congress,  which  had  loyally  supported  the  President 
since  its  ratification  of  his  extraordinary  war  measures  in  the 
summer  of  1861,  finally  turned  against  him.  Lincoln  issued  a 
proclamation  in  December,  1863,  looking  toward  the  restora- 
tion of  the  seceded  states  to  their  place  in  the  Union.  Whenever 
10  per  cent  of  the  qualified  voters  of  1860  in  any  state  should 
take  an  oath  of  allegiance  to  the  United  States,  accept  the  acts 
of  Congress  and  the  proclamations  of  the  President  on  the  sub- 
ject of  slavery,  and  reestablish  a  state  government,  he  would 
recognize  that  government  as  a  true  state.2  The  radical  Repub- 
licans and  the  Democrats,  under  the  lead  of  Henry  Winter 
Davis  of  Maryland  in  the  House  and  Benjamin  Wade  of  Ohio 
in  the  Senate,  opposed  Lincoln's  plan  as  too  lenient  to  the  South 
and  a  usurpation  of  power  by  the  executive.  They  got  a  bill 
through  Congress  declaring  that  the  seceded  states  were  out  of 
the  Union  and  requiring  a  clear  majority  of  the  voters  of  any 
state  to  take  the  oath  of  allegiance  before  its  reconstruction 
could  begin.  For  readmission  into  the  Union  a  state  must 
accept  the  abolition  of  slavery,  repudiate  its  debt  incurred  in  the 

Lincoln  patiently  replied:  "My  paramount  object  in  this  struggle  is  to  save  the 
Union,  and  is  not  either  to  save  or  to  destroy  slavery.  If  I  could  save  the 
Union  without  freeing  any  slave,  I  would  do  it ;  and  if  I  could  save  it  by  free- 
ing all  the  slaves,  I  would  do  it.  ...  What  I  do  about  slavery  and  the  colored 
race,  I  do  because  I  believe  it  helps  to  save  the  Union  ;  and  what  I  forbear,  I 
forbear  because  I  believe  it  would  not  help  to  save  the  Union." 

aA  severe  draft  riot  occurred  in  New  York  in  July,  1863,  in  which  over  a 
thousand  persons  lost  their  lives,  and  which  was  quelled  only  after  four  days  of 
horror,  by  an  order  from  the  provost  marshal  suspending  the  draft  in  New 
York  and  Brooklyn  and  by  the  return  of  the  militia  regiments  from  Gettysburg. 
A  chief  cause  of  the  riot  was  the  hostility  between  the  immigrant  laborers  and 
the  colored  men  of  New  York.  The  Irish  resented  the  employment  of  negroes 
as  strike-breakers  and  refused  to  be  drafted  into  a  war  to  fight  for  "niggers." 

2 This  was  limited,  of  course,  to  executive  recognition.  Lincoln  had  no  power 
to  assure  representatives  and  senators  from  the  restored  "states"  seats  in  Con- 
gress, each  House  being  the  judge,  by  the  Constitution,  of  the  qualifications  of 
its  own  members. 


6oo  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

support  of  the  Confederacy,  and  exclude  certain  classes  of 
people  from  holding  office.  The  Da  vis- Wade  Bill  was  submit- 
ted to  the  President  for  his  signature  on  the  very  day  (July  4, 
1864)  that  Congress  was  to  adjourn.  Unwilling  to  accept  the 
doctrine  that  the  seceded  states  were  out  of  the  Union,  or  to 
adopt  as  yet  any  single  rigid  scheme  for  their' reconstruction,  or 
to  see  the  work  already  begun  in  Louisiana,  Arkansas,  and  Ten- 
nessee under  his  10  per  cent  plan  undone,  Lincoln  withheld  his 
signature  from  the  Davis-Wade  Bill.1  The  authors  replied  by  a 
fierce  attack  on  the  President  in  the  New  York  Tribune,  accus- 
ing him  of  a  "studied  outrage  on  the  legislative  authority  of  the 
people"  at  the  dictation  of  personal  ambition  and  warning  him 
that  "if  he  wishes  our  support,  he  must  confine  himself  to  his 
executive  duties — to  obey  and  execute  and  not  to  make  the  laws 
— to  suppress  by  arms  armed  rebellion,  and  leave  political  reor- 
ganization to  Congress."  It  is  little  wonder  that  under  the 
burden  of  political  opposition  and  personal  detraction  greater 
than  that  borne  by  any  other  president  since  the  days  of  George 
Washington  the  lines  in  Abraham  Lincoln's  face  deepened  into 
furrows  and  the  genial  smile  faded  from  his  lips  and  eyes. 

Jefferson  Davis  had  perhaps  even  a  harder  burden  to  bear. 
At  least,  he  lacked  the  qualities  of  his  Northern  rival  which 
alleviated  the  burden.  In  the  place  of  Lincoln's  physical  robust- 
ness he  had  a  nervous,  delicate,  high-strung  constitution.  His 
wife  wrote  that  again  and  again  he  came  home  from  his  office 
tormented  by  a  racking  headache  and  apparently  on  the  verge 
of  a  complete  mental  collapse.  His  mind  was  rigid,  lacking  that 
great  flexibility  of  judgment  and  willingness  to  be  persuaded 
which  were  so  conspicuous  in  Lincoln's  mental  temper.  He  was 
not  charitable  of  opposition,  and,  above  all,  he  entirely  lacked 
the  saving  grace  of  humor,  which  in  Lincoln's  large  mind  was 

aAs  the  president  has  ten  days  for  the  consideration  of  any  bill  passed  by 
Congress,  he  can  defeat  a  bill  handed  to  him  within  ten  days  of  adjournment 
simply  by  putting  it  in  his  pocket.  The  "pocket  veto"  of  the  Davis-Wade  Bill 
was  important  as  the  first  gun  in  a  long  and  bitter  battle  between  the  president 
and  Congress  over  their  respective  spheres  of  authority  in  dealing  with  the 
reconstruction  of  the  seceded  states. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  601 

the  solvent  of  a  thousand  cares  and  worries.  The  exigencies  of 
war  compelled  Davis  to  be  as  "autocratic"  as  Lincoln,  but  the 
temper  and  tradition  of  the  South  were  far  less  favorable  to 
executive  centralization.  It  was  only  as  a  "nation"  that  the 
South  could  fight  the  war  with  any  hope  of  success,  yet  the  in- 
veterate states '-rights  pretensions  constantly  stood  in  the  way 
of  Southern  nationalism.  Nothing  could  exceed  the  fidelity  of 
the  men  and  officers  in  the  field  and  the  self-sacrificing  devotion 
of  the  women  at  home  to  the  Southern  cause,  but  the  political 
opposition  to  President  Davis's  conduct  of  the  war,  in  the  press, 
the  Congress,  and  the  state  governments,  was  constant  and 
bitter.  Editors  of  influential  papers  called  him  "an  incubus" 
and  spoke  of  him  as  directing  the  war  "from  his  cushioned  seat 
in  Richmond."  His  vice  president,  Stephens,  characterized  him 
as  "a  man  of  good  intentions,  weak,  vacillating,  timid,  petulant, 
peevish,  obstinate,  and  aiming  at  absolute  power."  A  Virginia 
newspaper  friendly  to  the  administration  begged  the  opposition 
press  to  stop  complaining  of  "imaginary  violations  of  the  Con- 
stitution" and  to  hold  up  the  president's  hands;  for  "only 
when  our  independence  is  achieved,  established,  and  acknowl- 
edged," it  said,  "will  the  sovereignty  of  the  states  be  a  reality."1 
Governors  of  states,  especially  the  original  states  of  the  sea- 
board, resisted  the  acts  of  Congress  for  the  conscription  of  men, 
the  impressment  of  food,  the  suspension  of  the  writ  of  Habeas 
Corpus,  the  control  of  the  militia,  and  the  regulation  of  their  ex- 
ports and  imports,  as  an  invasion  of  their  sphere  of  authority. 
The  convention  of  South  Carolina  proposed  to  allow  no  recruit- 
ment of  soldiers  within  the  state  except  with  the  consent  of  the 
legislature.  The  impetuous  Governor  Joseph  Brown  of  Georgia 
denounced  the  Conscription  Act  as  "unconstitutional"  and 
scolded  the  administration  after  the  fall  of  Atlanta  for  "leaving 
Georgia  to  her  fate."  He  threatened  the  Secretary  of  War, 
Seddon,  that  he  would  call  all  the  sons  of  Georgia  to  "return  to 
their  state  and  rally  round  her  glorious  flag."  He  was  ready  to 
fight  both  the  Union  and  the  Confederacy  if  they  did  not  stop 

1  General  Lee,  with  unwonted  sarcasm,  remarked  that  "the  mistake  of  the 
South  was  in  making  all  its  best  military  officers  editors  of  newspapers." 


602  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

invading  the  sovereign  rights  of  Georgia.  Governor  Vance  of 
North  Carolina,  a  precisionist  and  an  obstructionist,  carried  on 
an  acrimonious  and  interminable  correspondence  with  the  au- 
thorities at  Richmond,  objecting  to  every  measure  of  Congress 
or  the  executive  that  was  designed  to  help  win  the  war.  He  freed 
military  prisoners  by  the  defiant  issue  of  the  writ  of  Habeas 
Corpus,  ignored  the  orders  from  Richmond  for  the  control  of 
commerce  and  the  requisition  of  produce,  threatened  at  one 
time  to  raise  militia  to  drive  the  regular  troops  out  of  a  part  of 
his  state,  and  gave  his  belated  support  wholly  to  the  Southern 
cause  only  toward  the  close  of  the  war,  when  he  was  confronted 
with  the  dilemma  of  choosing  between  the  peace  party,  who 
were  willing  to  "  secede  from  secession,"  and  the  war  party, 
who  stood  for  Southern  independence.  Vance  seemed  incapable 
of  realizing  that  it  was  impossible  for  the  South  to  wage  the  war 
with  the  remotest  prospect  of  success  if  the  sovereign  rights 
of  the  states  were  to  remain  unimpaired.  Compared  with  the 
behavior  of  Brown  and  Vance  the  opposition  of  Governor  Sey- 
mour of  New  York  to  Lincoln  was  mild.  In  no  state  of  the 
secession  did  Davis  have  the  cordial  and  enthusiastic  support 
that  was  given  to  Lincoln  by  war  governors  like  Andrew  of 
Massachusetts,  Morton  of  Indiana,  Yates  of  Illinois,  Dennison, 
Tod,  and  Brough  of  Ohio,  Randall  of  Wisconsin,  Sprague  of 
Rhode  Island,  and  Cur  tin  of  Pennsylvania. 

After  Cameron's  removal  from  the  War  Department  at  the 
beginning  of  1862,  no  member  of  Lincoln's  cabinet  was  seriously 
antagonized  by  Congress  until  political  opposition  to  the  Blairs 
caused  the  resignation  of  the  Postmaster-General,  in  Septem- 
ber, 1864.  But  the  legislature  at  Richmond  was  constantly  har- 
assing President  Davis's  secretaries  and  forcing  changes  in  the 
cabinet.  The  special  objects  of  criticism  were  C.  C.  Memminger 
of  the  Treasury  and  the  brilliant  Judah  P.  Benjamin,  "the 
ablest,  most  versatile,  and  most  constant  of  all  Davis's  civil  coun- 
sellors," who  occupied  successively  the  positions  of  Attorney- 
General,  Secretary  of  War,  and  Secretary  of  State,  and  whom 
Davis,  in  spite  of  the  most  bitter  attacks  from  Congress,  stead- 
fastly refused  to  dismiss.  At  the  beginning  of  1865  a  delegation 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  603 

from  Congress  waited  on  President  Davis  with  the  request  that 
all  the  members  of  the  cabinet  except  Secretary  Trenholm  (who 
had  succeeded  Memminger  in  the  Treasury)  be  asked  to  resign; 
and  at  the  same  time  there  were  rumors  of  a  cabal  in  Congress 
(like  the  Conway  Cabal  in  the  Revolutionary  War)  to  set  aside 
Davis  himself  and  offer  a  dictatorship  to  General  Lee. 

Notwithstanding  all  this  opposition  to  the  " tyranny"  of  Jef- 
ferson Davis,  the  Confederate  administration  was,  on  the  whole, 
more  observant  of  constitutional  limitations  than  was  the  Fed- 
eral government.  Lincoln  was  authorized  by  the  act  of  March  3, 
1863,  to  suspend  the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus  whenever  and  wher- 
ever he  pleased ;  but  the  Confederate  Congress,  in  spite  of  the 
fact  that  the  invading  armies  were  encamped  on  the  soil  of 
the  South,  never  gave  President  Davis  this  blanket  authority. 
The  writ  was  suspended  in  the  South  only  for  limited  periods  be- 
tween the  spring  of  1862  and  the  summer  of  1864,  and  military 
arrests  were  allowed  only  for  "  treason,  conspiracy,  desertion, 
and  communicating  intelligence  to  or  trading  unlawfully  with 
the  enemy."1  The  Confederate  Congress  never  made  its  paper 
money  (Treasury  notes)  legal  tender,  as  the  North  did  the 
"greenbacks";  it  never  created  a  national  banking-system  to 
float  and  support  its  bonds,  as  Secretary  Chase  did  (see 
page  607) ;  it  never  organized  a  Supreme  Court,  as  it  was  di- 
rected to  do  by  the  Constitution,  "in  view,"  says  Schwab,  "of 
the  particularistic  feeling  which  such  an  enlargement  of  the 
central  authority  would  have  necessarily  stimulated."2 

Turning  now  from  the  strictly  political  to  the  politico- 
economic  aspects  of  the  two  sections,  we  note  first  the  striking 
difference  in  the  methods  of  the  North  and  of  the  South  in  pro- 
viding the  enormous  sums  of  money  needed  to  finance  the  war. 
The  North  was  a  highly  developed  industrial  and  agricultural 
country,  with  large  amounts  of  money  in  circulation  and  on  de- 
posit in  the  banks,  thus  offering  the  government  a  fair  field  for 
loans  and  taxes.  Except  in  a  few  centers,  like  New  Orleans, 

1  Compare   the   drastic  proclamation   of  Lincoln's   of   September   24,    1862 
(page  598,  n.  i). 

2  J.  C.  Schwab,  "The  Confederate  States  of  America,"  p.  220. 


604  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

Charleston,  and  Richmond,  the  South  had  scant  supplies  of  fluid 
capital.  Its  wealth  was  in  the  cotton  crop,  and  the  eventual 
marketing  of  that  crop  was  the  resource  on  which  the  entire 
fiscal  policy  of  the  Confederacy  was  based.  Though  the  North 
issued  about  $450,000,000  of  greenbacks,  or  non-interest-bearing 
Treasury  notes,  these  notes  were  hardly  more  than  one  fifth  of 
the  regular  bonded  loans,  with  interest  payable  in  coin  ;  and  after 
the  machinery  of  taxation  in  customs  duties,  internal  revenue, 
and  income  taxes  got  to  working,  the  amounts  received  from 
these  sources  more  than  equaled  the  issues  of  paper  money. 

The  South,  on  the  other  hand,  became  committed  early  in 
the  war  to  the  issue  of  Treasury  notes  and  never  realized  more 
than  trifling  amounts  of  specie  from  taxation  or  loans.  Just 
what  volume  of  non-interest-bearing  notes  the  Confederate 
government  issued  is  not  known,  but  conservative  scholars  esti- 
mate it  at  no  less  than  $1,000,000,000.  For  example,  in  the 
first  nine  months  of  the  year  1863  the  receipts  of  the  Con- 
federate Treasury  were  $600,000,000,  of  which  only  $5,000,000, 
or  less  than  i  per  cent,  were  from  taxes,  $153,000,000  (25  per 
cent)  from  the  sale  of  bonds,  and  $442,000,000  (74  per  cent) 
in  notes.  Although  the  Confederate  government  did  not  make 
the  notes  legal  tender,1  it  still  found  itself  obliged,  by  their 
rapid  depreciation,  to  resort  to  partial  repudiation.  In  February, 
1864,  when  the  paper  dollar  was  worth  only  6  cents,  the  holders 
of  the  notes  were  given  the  option  of  converting  them  into  4  per 
cent  bonds  or  accepting  a  new  standard  of  value,  in  which  three 
of  the  old  dollars  were  equal  to  two  of  the  new.  This  act  gave 
the  finishing  stroke  to  Confederate  credit.  Secretary  Trenholm 
wrote  to  Governor  Bonham  of  South  Carolina  in  August,  1864, 
"Apprehensions  of  ultimate  repudiation  crept  like  an  all- 
pervading  poison  into  the  minds  of  the  people,  and  greatly 
diminished  the  purchasing  power  of  the  notes." 


of  the  state  governments,  however,  compelled  creditors  to  receive  the 
notes,  and  public  opinion  was  exerted  in  various  ways  to  coerce  those  who  re- 
fused them.  The  legislature  of  Florida  passed  an  act  in  1863  providing  that 
anyone  who  was  exempt  from  military  service  should  be  put  into  the  ranks 
immediately  if  he  refused  to  accept  the  Treasury  notes. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  605 

The  North  was  slower  than  the  South  in  making  provision 
for  the  war.  Long  before  the  extra  session  of  Congress  met  at 
Washington,  July  4,  1861,  the  provisional  Congress  at  Mont- 
gomery had  seized  the  money  in  the  mints  of  the  South  and 
secured  nearly  half  the  available  specie  in  the  Southern  banks 
by  a  $15,000,000  loan  at  8  per  cent,  the  interest  on  which  was 
guaranteed  by  an  export  duty  of  one  eighth  of  a  cent  a  pound 
on  cotton.  In  March  it  had  issued  the  first  $1,000,000  of 
Treasury  notes  and  in  May  provided  for  a  loan  of  $50,000,000 
(later  increased  to  $150,000,000)  in  twenty-year  bonds,  for 
which  cotton  and  produce  were  receivable.  The  Federal  Con- 
gress in  July  authorized  Secretary  Chase  to  borrow$2  50,000,000, 
increased  the  tariff,  and  levied  a  direct  tax  of  $20,000,000  on  the 
states  and  an  income  tax  of  3  per  cent  on  incomes  above  $800. 
By  an  appeal  to  the  New  York  bankers  Chase  secured  a  loan 
of  $150,000,000  in  August,  but  the  opening  of  the  year  1862 
found  the  Federal  government  in  debt  $100,000,000,  with  an 
estimated  need  of  $250,000,000  to  .$300,000,000  more  before 
the  end  of  June.  The  people  of  the  North  were  able  and  willing, 
as  the  event  proved,  to  bear  heavy  taxation,  but  it  would  be  at 
least  a  year  before  the  new  tax  schedules  would  yield  their 
revenue  to  the  Treasury,  and  meanwhile  the  need  for  money 
was  pressing.  "We  must  have  at  least  $100,000,000  during  the 
next  three  months,"  said  Spaulding  in  the  House,  "or  the 
government  must  stop  payment." 

Under  these  circumstances,  and  in  spite  of  great  opposition 
from  bankers  and  economists,  Congress  resorted  to  that  most 
tempting,  dangerous,  and  ultimately  most  expensive  method 
of  procuring  funds;  namely,  the  creation  of  an  unsupported 
paper  currency.  An  act  of  February  25,  1862,  authorized  the 
issue  of  $150,000,000  non-interest-bearing  Treasury  notes, 
which  were  to  be  legal  tender,  receivable  for  all  debts  and  public 
dues  except  duties  on  imports.  On  the  same  day  Congress  voted 
an  issue  of  $500,000,000  in  6  per  cent  bonds,  due  in  twenty 
years  but  redeemable  at  the  pleasure  of  the  government  after 
five  years.  These  bonds  were  called  the  "five-twenties."  The 
Treasury  notes,  or  greenbacks,  were  convertible  into  the  five- 


606  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

twenties,  and  it  was  hoped  that  they  would  be  rapidly  turned 
into  the  Treasury  in  payment  for  the  bonds.  A  new  tax  bill  fol- 
lowed on  July  i,  imposing  taxes  on  almost  every  product  of  in- 
dustry and  process  of  exchange.1  On  July  14  the  tariff  was 
raised. 

The  greenbacks,  aside  from  being  of  doubtful  constitution- 
ality,2 were  a  source  of  injustice,  since  they  furnished  debtors 
with  a  currency  for  paying  their  debts  cheaper  than  that  in 
which  the  debts  had  been  contracted.  Moreover,  the  easy  ex- 
pedient of  printing  paper  and  endowing  it  with  the  quality  of 
"money"  by  fiat  proved  (as  it  always  has  in  history)  too  strong 
a  temptation  to  a  government  in  urgent  need  of  funds.  What 
was  intended  as  a  temporary  stimulant  became  a  regular  diet. 
By  successive  issues  the  volume  of  greenbacks  was  raised  to 
$449,338,902  in  1864.  The  inevitable  result  was  an  inflation 
of  prices  and  speculation  in  specie.  Gold  stood  at  172  in  Feb- 
ruary, 1863,  and  rose  to  285  in  July,  1864,  when  General  Early 
was  threatening  the  defenses  of  Washington.  The  government 
thought  that  it  would  be  more  profitable  to  issue  greenbacks 
than  to  sell  its  bonds  for  what  they  would  bring  in  the  market 
(estimated  at  60) ;  but  it  actually  lost  hundreds  of  millions  by 
this  policy.3  For  with  gold  at  2  85  the  government  was  receiving 
for  its  bonds  paper  dollars  worth  only  35  cents  and  was  paying 
in  coin  1 7  per  cent  on  its  6  per  cent  bonds. 

At  the  opening  of  1863  the  Federal  government  was  in  a  bad 
way  financially.  The  debt  was  nearing  $1,000,000,000,  and  the 
expenses  were  $2,500,000  a  day.  The  arrears  of  pay  to  the 
soldiers  and  sailors  were  $60,000,000.  Gold  was  at  a  premium 

1  These  taxes,  growing  with  business,  brought  to  the  Treasury  the  immense 
sum  of  $311,000,000  during  the  year  1866. 

2 The  Constitution  (Art.  I,  sect.  10,  par.  i)  forbids  the  states  to  make  any- 
thing but  gold  and  silver  legal  tender,  and  it  was  argued  that  the  national 
government  could  not,  or  should  not,  commit  an  economic  injustice  which  it 
had  forbidden  to  the  states.  In  a  case  in  the  Supreme  Court,  five  years  after 
the  war,  Chase  himself,  then  Chief  Justice,  pronounced  against  the  constitution- 
ality of  the  greenbacks. 

3 It  also  bequeathed  the  country  the  "greenback  problem"  in  currency  leg- 
islation, which  was  not  settled  until  fifteen  years  after  the  war. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  607 

of  72.  The  bonds  were  not  selling,  and  the  failure  of  the  Army 
of  the  Potomac  to  take  Richmond  had  brought  widespread  dis- 
couragement. At  this  critical  time  Secretary  Chase  executed 
the  most  successful  financial  measure  of  the  war  in  the  creation 
of  the  national  banking-system.  On  February  25,  1863,  an  act 
of  Congress  provided  that  any  group  of  not  fewer  than  five  per- 
sons, furnishing  a  capital  of  $100,000  in  cities  of  over  10,000 
inhabitants  and  of  $50,000  in  smaller  centers,  might  organize  a 
banking-association.  They  must  purchase  United  States  bonds 
to  the  amount  of  at  least  one  third  of  their  paid-up  capital,  and 
in  return  they  should  receive  from  the  Comptroller  of  the  Cur- 
rency notes  equal  to  90  per  cent  of  the  market  value  of  the 
bonds.  These  "bank  notes"  were  a  true  national  currency, 
receivable  for  all  dues  to  the  United  States  (except  customs 
duties,  which  must  be  in  coin  for  the  payment  of  the  interest 
on  the  bonds)  and  protected  from  the  fluctuations  of  the  state- 
bank  currency  by  the  credit  of  the  United  States  bonds  behind 
them.  By  an  act  of  March  3,  1865,  a  tax  of  10  per  cent  was 
imposed  on  the  notes  of  the  state  banks,  driving  them  out  of 
circulation.  They  had  been  a  source  of  confusion  and  em- 
barrassment in  our  currency  since  the  formation  of  the  govern- 
ment, and  their  replacement  by  a  national  currency  was  one  of 
the  most  beneficent  results  of  the  Civil  War.1 

The  National  Bank  Act  was  a  blessing  in  every  way.  Besides 
creating  a  stable  and  reliable2  national  currency  it  opened  an 
eager  market  for  the  sale  of  the  government's  bonds.  $300,- 
000,000  of  greenbacks  came  into  the  Treasury  in  exchange  for 
them.  The  bankers,  in  addition  to  receiving  the  interest  on  the 
bonds  deposited  with  the  Comptroller,  enjoyed  the  profits  from 

1In  1861  there  were  nine  hundred  state  banks  issuing  notes  without  a  specie 
basis.  According  to  the  Bankers'  Magazine  of  January,  1863,  $170,000,000  of 
the  $202,000,000  of  state-bank  notes  then  in  circulation  had  either  no  security 
or  very  bad  security  behind  them.  Various  bankers'  associations  had  tried  in 
vain  to  cope  with  the  situation,  by  refusing  to  accept  the  issues  of  banks  which 
did  not  comply  with  certain  rules. 

2  The  notes  of  the  state  banks  were  subject  to  all  kinds  of  fluctuations  and 
were  so  easily  counterfeited  that  a  manual  called  the  Bank  Detector  was  an 
indispensable  equipment  for  every  cashier. 


6o8  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

the  loan  of  the  bank  notes;  and  the  business  interests  of  the 
country  at  large,  through  the  multifarious  transactions  of  credit 
and  discount,  were  enlisted  in  the  support  of  the  government 
securities  which  lay  behind  their  currency.  It  was  an  ingenious 
device  for  distributing  the  burden  of  the  debt  through  the  com- 
munity without  the  sinister  features  of  a  forced  loan  or  currency 
inflation,  which  characterized  the  issue  of  the  greenbacks.  And 
the  national-bank  system  served  the  country  well  until  the 
twentieth  century,  when  the  bonded  indebtedness  of  the  United 
States  became  too  narrow  a  basis  for  the  support  of  a  currency 
adequate  to  the  increasing  volume  of  business.1  Three  months 
after  the  act  the  condition  of  the  Treasury  was  greatly  improved. 
The  victories  of  Gettysburg,  Vicksburg,  and  Chattanooga  fur- 
ther strengthened  the  public  credit,  and  in  his  annual  message 
of  December,  1863,  President  Lincoln  could  announce,  with 
other  cheering  news,  that  "all  demands  on  the  Treasury"  had 
been  "promptly  met  and  fully  satisfied,"  and  that  "by  no  people 
were  the  burdens  incident  to  a  great  war  ever  more  cheerfully 
borne."  There  was  discouragement  enough,  and  political  dis- 
affection to  follow  in  1864,  but  national  bankruptcy  was  not 
among  the  worries. 

The  financial  condition  of  the  South,  on  the  other  hand,  grew 
steadily  worse  after  the  spring  of  1863.  When  the  $20,000,000 
or  so  of  specie  obtained  at  the  beginning  of  the  war2  had  been 
exhausted  by  the  purchase  of  supplies  and  munitions  abroad,  the 
Confederate  government  found  it  impossible  to  get  money.  The 
flood  of  Treasury  notes  sent  prices  soaring,  and  as  expenses  in- 
creased, the  only  way  of  meeting  them  was  by  new  issues  of 
notes — making  a  vicious  financial  circle.  The  Confederate  paper 
dollar  was  worth  only  33  cents  in  gold  at  the  beginning  of  1863. 
After  Gettysburg  and  Vicksburg  it  sank  to  10  cents,  after  Chat- 
tanooga to  5  cents,  and  at  the  close  of  the  war  to  1.6  cents. 
Flour  sold  at  $1000  a  barrel,  shoes  at  $200  a  pair,  coffee  at 

1The  remedy  was  found  in  the  Owen-Glass  Act,  of  1913,  which  established 
the  Federal  Reserve  banking-system. 

2  This  had  been  secured  through  the  seizure  of  the  money  in  the  mints  and 
from  the  $15,000,000  loan,  which  took  most  of  the  available  specie  in  the  banks. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  609 

$40  a  pound,  and  wood  at  $5  a  stick.  When  the  farmers  refused 
to  sell  their  produce  for  the  depreciated  notes,  the  government 
commandeered  it  by  impressment.  But  the  process  was  waste- 
ful and  inefficient.  Supplies  of  beef,  bacon,  flour,  and  cotton 
were  accumulated  at  points  whence  they  could  not  be  dis- 
tributed for  lack  of  an  adequate  transportation  system,  or  were 
destroyed  before  the  advance  of  the  Federal  armies  or  sold  by 
dishonest  agents.  The  fever  of  speculation  raged.  Everybody 
was  anxious  to  convert  the  sinking  notes  into  commodities  be- 
fore they  sank  still  further.  A  national  banking-system  like 
that  of  the  North,  although  discussed,  was  impossible,  for  there 
was  no  stability  in  the  bonds  on  which  it  must  necessarily  have 
rested.  Even  the  best  of  the  bond  issues  (the  $15,000,000  loan, 
secured  by  the  duty  on  cotton  exports),  which  stood  at  90  in 
the  spring  of  1862,  dropped  to  40  before  the  end  of  the  year,  as 
the  blockade  shut  off  the  cotton  trade,  and  were  quoted  at  5 
and  under  in  1864. 

The  most  promising  attempt  of  the  Confederate  government 
to  secure  specie  from  abroad  was  the  Erlanger  loan.  Early  in 
1863,  when  the  military  hopes^of  the  South  were  high,  Secretary 
Memminger  arranged  with  Emile  Erlanger,  a  Paris  banker, 
for  floating  in  Europe  a  loan  of  $15,000,000,  bearing  7  per  cent 
interest,  the  principal  payable  in  New  Orleans  cotton  at  1 2  cents 
a  pound,  within  six  months  after  the  conclusion  of  peace.  As 
cotton  had  advanced  in  England  from  14  cents  a  pound  in  May, 
1861,  to  44  cents  in  December,  1862,  the  loan  offered  roseate 
promises  of  profit — -provided  the  South  could  get  the  cotton  to 
Europe.1  Erlanger  took  the  bonds  at  77  and  sold  them  readily 
in  England  at  95^,  the  loan  being  oversubscribed  in  London 
threefold  in  two  days.  But  with  the  improvement  in  the  Federal 
finances  the  Erlanger  bonds  began  to  drop.  The  Confederate 


!At  the  time  of  the  loan  the  Confederate  government  had  on  hand  over 
350,000  bales  of  cotton,  obtained  from  the  produce  loan  and  impressment,  which 
at  12  cents  a  pound  would  have  far  more  than  covered  the  Erlanger  loan.  But  the 
inexorable  Federal  blockade  kept  the  cotton  from  the  market.  Of  all  the  430,000 
bales  which  the  government  secured  during  the  war,  less  than  20,000,  or  5  per 
cent,  got  through  the  blockade. 


6io  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

government  spent  $6,000,000  of  the  proceeds  in  "bulling"  the 
London  markejt,  buying  back  the  bonds  at  90  to  keep  the  price 
up.  But  it  was  in  vain.  Gettysburg  and  Vicksburg  sent  them 
down  to  65 ;  Chattanooga,  to  37.  They  recovered  with  the  re- 
newal of  Confederate  hopes  in  1864,  and  on  McClelland  nomi- 
nation for  the  presidency  on  a  platform  which  promised  peace 
they  reached  84;  but  they  quickly  fell  off  again,  and  became 
worthless  with  the  triumph  of  the  Union  arms  in  1865.  The 
bondholders  lost  $i  0,000,000.*  The  Confederate  government, 
after  deducting  the  discounts  and  commissions  to  Erlanger 
and  the  money  spent  in  bulling  the  market,  realized  only 
$6,250,000.*  Only  Erlanger  profited  by  the  transaction,  clear- 
ing up  some  $2,500,000  on  the  deal. 

In  the  Civil  War,  as  in  all  wars,  "the  instincts  of  trade  con- 
flicted with  the  instincts  of  patriotism."  The  extremity  of  the 
government  was  the  opportunity  of  the  profiteer.  Huge  profits 
were  made  by  selling  supplies  (often  of  inferior  quality)  to  the 
government  and  by  speculating  in  the  fluctuating  values  of  all 
commodities.  The  high  price  of  cotton  in  the  North  offered 
temptations  to  the  planter  that  could  not  be  resisted.  Politi- 
cians, officials  of  the  government,  and  even  generals  in  the  field 
speculated  in  cotton.  Northern  currency  was  quoted  on  the 
Richmond  exchange  and  freely  circulated  in  the  South  at  the 
close  of  the  war  in  spite  of  laws  against  it.  The  economic  con- 
dition of  the  Confederacy  can  be  summed  up  in  a  word :  the 
blockade  isolated  the  South,  which  was  not  sufficiently  de- 
veloped in  manufactures,  transportation,  banking,  or  capital 
accumulations  to  take  care  of  itself.  The  blockade  starved 
the  South  into  surrender.  None  of  the  Northern  victories, 
except  Vicksburg  and  Nashville,  wiped  out  Southern  armies; 
but  the  steady  pressure  of  the  blockade  reduced  the  whole 

1From  time  to  time  for  twenty  years  after  the  close  of  the  war  the  English 
bondholders  entertained  hopes  of  recovering  some  of  their  lost  fortunes,  even 
though  the  Confederate  debt  was  repudiated  by  the  Fourteenth  Amendment. 

2Schwab  estimates  that  this  $6,250,000,  with  the  $15,000,000  loan  of  1861  and 
the  $5,500,000  from  customs  and  the  mints, — a  total  of  about  $27,000,000, — 
"constituted  the  entire  specie  revenue  of  the  Confederacy  during  its  four  years 
existence"  (J.  C.  Schwab,  "The  Confederate  State  of  America,"  p.  42). 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  611 

South  to  a  degree  of  destitution  which  made  the  further  support 
of  armies  impossible. 

The  North,  on  the  other  hand,  after  a  temporary  economic 
embarrassment  caused  by  the  actual  shock  of  war,  the  loss  of  the 
Southern  markets,  the  confiscation  of  the  $200,000,000  owed 
to  the  North  by  the  Southern  planters  and  merchants,  the  drain 
of  specie  from  the  banks,  and  the  disappearance  of  a  metallic 
currency,1  entered  with  the  year  1863  on  a  period  of  industrial 
prosperity  which  continued  increasingly  through  the  war.  Pro- 
fessor Fite,  in  his  "  Social  and  Industrial  Conditions  in  the 
North  during  the  Civil  War,"  has  presented  a  bewildering  array 
of  statistics  to  show  the  progress  in  agriculture,  manufactures, 
commerce,  transportation,  public  works,  education,  and  chari- 
ties in  these  four  years.  The  unprecedented  demand  of  the 
government  for  supplies  of  all  kinds, — munitions,  horses, 
wagons,  blankets,  shoes,  clothing,  and  food, — the  enlarged 
European  market  for  our  grain  and  beef,  and  the  issue  of  an 
abundant  national  currency  all  stimulated  industry  and  sent 
prices  soaring.  Millionaires  began  to  abound,  and,  while  luxury 
and  extravagance  ran  riot,  contributions  to  charities  and  endow- 
ments were  never  more  generous.  The  Sanitary  Commission, 
the  Christian  Commission,  Ladies'  Aid  Societies,  and  numerous 
other  associations  for  the  relief  of  the  soldiers  and  their  families 
were  the  precursors  of  the  Red  Cross,2  the  "Y's",  the  Knights 
of  Columbus,  and  other  relief  agencies  of  the  great  World  War. 
The  Sanitary  Commission  alone  spent  about  $25,000,000  for 
the  care  and  comfort  of  soldiers  in  the  field  and  in  soldiers' 


banks  suspended  specie  payments  at  the  close  of  1861,  and  not  only 
gold  but  silver  began  to  be  an  object  of  speculation.  Silver  coins  disappeared 
from  circulation,  and  their  place  was  taken  by  postage  stamps  and  "shin- 
plasters" —  or  tokens  of  indebtedness  issued  by  tradesmen,  hotel  and  restaurant 
keepers,  business  concerns,  and  shopkeepers.  By  an  act  of  July,  1862,  Congress 
prohibited  the  use  of  shinplasters,  and  later  substituted  for  the  inconvenient, 
sticky  postage  stamps  a  varicolored  "scrip"  of  small  notes  ranging  in  value 
from  3  to  50  cents.  This  paper  "fractional  currency"  was  not  replaced  by  coins 
for  more  than  a  decade  after  the  war. 

2  The  Red  Cross  was  organized,  at  Geneva,  in  1863,  but  not  joined  by  the 
United  States  until  after  the  Civil  War. 


612  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

homes.  The  women,  both  North  and  South,  were  tireless  in 
their  devotion  to  works  of  mercy,  though  the  women  of  the 
South  were  called  upon  to  endure  a  greater  burden  of  self- 
sacrifice  and  sorrow  than  their  more  fortunate  sisters  of  the 
North.1 

The  war  brought  important  developments  in  the  relations  of 
capital  and  labor.  It  hastened  the  tendency,  visible  in  the  dec- 
ade of  the  fifties,  toward  the  consolidation  of  capital.  In  the 
first  place,  the  needs  of  the  government  encouraged  business 
on  a  large  scale.  The  enormous  currency  issues  and  the  huge 
profits  furnished  abundant  capital  for  investment.  Rising  prices 
called  for  the  reduction  of  expense  in  management  and  over- 
head charges.  The  multiplicity  of  taxes  on  products  in  every 
stage  of  manufacture  made  the  combination  of  as  many  indus- 
trial processes  as  possible  in  a  single  establishment  profitable.2 
And,  finally,  the  combinations  of  manufacturers  into  powerful 
associations  enabled  them  to  exert  an  influence  on  the  govern- 
ment in  its  tariff  legislation.  These  factors  all  worked  against 
the  small  manufacturer,  breaking  up  that  "self-reliant  local- 
ism" in  industry  which  had  prevailed  generally  before  the  war. 

The  lion's  share  of  the  benefits  of  the  new  industry  went  to 
the  capitalists.  Prices  and  profits  increased  far  more  rapidly 
than  wages,  the  estimated  ratio  for  the  whole  period  of  the 
war  being  about  100  to  55.  Those  who  felt  the  pinch  of  high 
prices  most  were  the  classes  without  organization  for  exerting 
pressure  on  the  economic  world, — the  unskilled  laborers  and  the 
poor  seamstresses, — or  people  living  on  fixed  salaries,  like  clerks, 

1  Speaking  at  one  of  the  great  fairs  of  the  Sanitary  Commission  at  Wash- 
ington in  1864,  President  Lincoln  said:  "I  am  not  accustomed  to  the  language 
of  eulogy;  I  have  not  studied  the  art  of  paying  compliments  to  women;  but  I 
must  say  that  if  all  that  has  been  said  by  orators  and  poets  since  the  creation  of 
the  world  in  praise  of  women  were  applied  to  the  women  of  America,  it  would 
not  do  them  justice  for  their  conduct  during  this  war.  I  will  close  by  saying, 
God  bless  the  women  of  America  ! " 

'  2Fite  cites  the  example  of  the  textile  industry.  There  was  a  tax  of  2  cents 
a  pound  on  the  sale  of  raw  cotton,  6  cents  a  pound  on  the  yarn,  6  per  cent  on 
the  woven  product,  6  per  cent  on  the  dyed  fabric.  The  firm  which  did  its  own 
spinning,  weaving,  and  dyeing  avoided  all  these  taxes  but  the  last  (E.  D.  Fite, 
"Social  and  Industrial  Conditions  in  the  North  during  the  Civil  War,"  p.  166). 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  613 

clergymen,  school-teachers,  and  college  professors.1  Before  the 
war  there  were  very  few  labor  unions  in  the  country,  and 
those  were  limited  in  location  and  meager  in  membership.  "In 
general,"  says  Fite,  "labor  was  contented  when  the  war  came 
and  little  need  of  united  action  was  felt."2  But  with  the  sharp 
rise  in  prices  and  the  tightening  of  capitalistic  control,  labor 
began  rapidly  to  organize.  Painters,  plasterers,  carpenters, 
hat-makers,  bricklayers,  masons,  tailors,  telegraphers,  engi- 
neers, cigar-makers,  and  a  score  of  other  trades  were  unionized. 
Nearly  fifty  new  unions  were  represented  at  a  meeting  in  New 
York  near  the  close  of  1863.  Indeed,  the  modern  problems  of 
American  labor — the  strike,  the  boycott,  the  lockout,  the 
"scab,"  picketing,  collective  bargaining,  arbitration — may  al- 
most be  said  to  have  originated  in  the  sharp  bifurcation  of 
capital  and  labor  during  the  Civil  War. 

This  concentration  of  industrial  life  was  simply  one  aspect 
of  the  general  centralizing  tendency  of  the  war.  Our  country 
was  first  welded  into  a  true  Union  in  the  fierce  fires  of  that 
ordeal.  The  national  state  replaced  the  federation  of  states. 
The  war  was  not  only  the  triumph  of  the  North  over  the  South, 
of  freedom  over  slavery — it  was  also  the  triumph  of  nationalism 
over  states'  rights,  of  Webster  over  Calhoun.  Besides  creating 
a  national  currency,  a  national  bankings-system,  a  national  army, 
and  national  taxes,  the  war  extended  and  enhanced  the  power  of 
the  central  government  in  a  score  of  ways.  All  the  jealous  re- 
strictions of  a  former  generation  were  broken  through.  Congress 
assessed  a  direct  tax  upon  the  states,  raised  a  national  mili- 
tia within  their  borders,  cut  off  the  western  counties  of  Vir- 
ginia and  admitted  them  as  a  new  state  to  the  Union,  exercised 
full  sovereignty  in  all  the  territories,  gave  homesteads  to  West- 

1For  example,  women  in  New  York  City,  in  1864,  working  fourteen  hours 
a  day  making  underwear  earned  less  than  $1.50  a  week.  Eight  hundred  school- 
teachers in  Philadelphia  received  80  cents  a  day — less  than  a  washerwoman's 
wages. 

2  "Social  and  Industrial  Conditions  in  the  North  during  the  Civil  War,"  p.  204. 
The  London  Times  of  December  i,  1863,  said,  "If  ever  there  was  a  country  in 
which  labor  was  in  clover,  in  which  it  was  petted  and  humored,  it  certainly 
was  this  North  American  community." 


6i4  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

ern  farmers,  endowed  colleges  in  all  the  states  for  the  promotion 
of  agriculture  and  the  mechanical  arts,  made  large  grants  of  land 
to  a  Pacific  railroad  and  underwrote  its  bonds.  The  National 
Republicans  of  1825,  a  John  Quincy  Adams  or  a  Henry  Clay, 
would  have  stood  aghast  at  the  nationalism  of  the  Republicans 
of  1865.  When  Abraham  Lincoln  was  inaugurated  in  1861,  he 
stood  before  "blocks  of  marble  and  piles  of  iron  castings"  of 
an  unfinished  Capitol.  During  the  war  the  House  and  Senate 
wings  were  completed  and  the  building  was  crowned  with  its 
majestic  dome.  The  finished  Capitol  was  the  symbol  of  the 
achievement  of  the  national  state.  Had  the  South  won  its  in- 
dependence it  is  not  probable  that  it  could  any  more  have  main- 
tained the  contradiction  of  a  "nation"  of  "sovereign  states" 
than  could  our  government  in  the  days  of  the  Confederation.1 

It  remains  to  speak  briefly  of  our  foreign  relations  during  the 
war.  The  governments  of  Europe,  with  two  conspicuous  ex- 
ceptions, were  favorable  to  the  Union.  Great  Britain,  still  gov- 
erned by  an  aristocracy  which  had  not  changed  essentially  since 
the  eighteenth  century,  and  France,  under  the  hypnotic  influ- 
ence of  that  prince  of  adventurers  the  emperor  Napoleon  III, 
gave  their  official  (and  often  officious)  sympathy  to  the  Con- 
federacy. The  governing  class  in  England  regarded  the  planter 
aristocracy  of  the  South  as  a  higher  social  order  than  the  as- 
sertive, leveling  democracy  of  the  North,  while  the  great  mer- 
cantile and  industrial  interests  on  which  the  power  of  the  Whig 
aristocracy  was  based  resented  the  protective  tariff  and  the 
blockade  of  the  cotton  ports.  Napoleon's  animus  against  the 
Union  proceeded  rather  from  a  general  jealousy  of  the  power 
of  the  great  transatlantic  republic  and  the  desire  to  complete 
his  uncle's  abandoned  project  of  restoring  the  diminished  in- 
fluence of  the  Latin  race  in  the  Western  Hemisphere.  Napo- 

1  Rhodes  contrasts  centralization  North  and  South  as  follows:  "The  Federal 
government  may  be  called  a  dictatorship.  Congress  and  the  people  surrendered 
certain  of  their  powers  and  rights  to  a  trusted  man.  The  Confederacy  was  a 
grand  socialized  state,  in  which  the  government  did  everything.  It  levied  directly 
on  the  produce  of  the  land  and  fixed  prices.  It  managed  the  railroads,  operated 
manufacturing  establishments,  owned  merchant  vessels,  and  carried  on  foreign 
commerce"  ("History  of  the  Civil  War,"  p.  394). 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  615 

Icon  was  far  less  scrupulous  than  the  Queen's  ministers  in 
observing  the  obligations  of  a  neutral.  He  tried  in  vain  to  get 
Great  Britain  and  Russia  to  join  him  in  forcing  the  United  States 
to  agree  to  an  armistice  of  six  months.  He  encouraged  the  ex- 
treme pro-Southern  advocates  in  Parliament,  like  Roebuck.  He 
gave  audiences  to  Jefferson  Davis's  special  envoy,  Slidell,  per- 
mitting him  to  have  ships  built  for  the  Confederacy  in  Bordeaux 
and  Nantes,  provided  their  destination  were  kept  secret.  He 
was  instrumental  in  floating  the  only  considerable  Confederate 
loan  in  Europe  (see  page  609).  And,  finally,  he  defied  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  by  erecting  an  empire  in  Mexico  at  the  point 
of  French  bayonets.  But,  on  the  whole,  our  contact  with 
France  was  so  slight  that  we  could  permit  Napoleon  to  continue 
his  persistent  and  ineffective  meddling  until  the  close  of  the 
war,  when  we  promptly  extinguished  his  phantom  empire  in 
Mexico. 

Great  Britain,  on  the  other  hand,  was  the  one  European 
power  with  whom  our  relations  had  been  continuous,  intimate  — 
and  generally  unfriendly.  As  mistress  of  the  seas,  as  our  chief 
transatlantic  customer,  as  our  permanent  neighbor  on  the  north, 
as  the  people  bound  to  us  by  the  ties  of  kinship,  language,  and 
tradition,  Great  Britain  could  never  be  regarded  with  indiffer- 
ence by  the  United  States.  We  expected  England  to  understand 
us  better,  to  judge  us  more  fairly,  to  support  our  common  ideals 
of  liberty  more  heartily,  than  did  any  other  foreign  nation.1  But 


solicitude  appears  constantly  in  public  dispatches  and  private  corre- 
spondence, in  lectures,  sermons,  essays,  and  poetry,  during  the  war,  sometimes 
in  the  pathetic  language  of  disillusionment,  sometimes  in  accents  of  bitter 
reproach.  Lowell  wrote  in  his  second  series  of  "Biglow  Papers": 

"We  know  we  have  a  cause,  John, 
Thet's  righteous,  just,  and  true; 
We  thought  'twould  win  applause,  John, 
Ef  nowheres  else,  from  you." 

The  correspondence  of  Charles  Sumner  and  John  Bright  is  filled  with  this  sen- 
timent. Our  minister  to  England,  Charles  Francis  Adams,  sums  up  the  indict- 
ment against  Great  Britain  as  follows:  "That  Great  Britain  did,  in  the  most 
terrible  moment  of  our  domestic  trial  in  struggling  with  a  monstrous  social  evil 
she  had  earnestly  professed  to  abhor,  coldly  and  at  once  assume  our  inability  to 


6i6  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

from  the  very  beginning  of  the  war  President  Lincoln  had  noth- 
ing but  trouble  with  the  Palmerston  ministry.  In  the  first 
place,  the  Queen's  proclamation  recognized  the  Confederacy 
as  a  belligerent  power  in  May,  1861,  before  the  South  had  won 
a  battle  on  land  or  sea  and  before  the  American  minister  had 
arrived  in  London.  There  was  no  intention  of  offending  the 
United  States  in  this  action,  as  Lord  John  Russell,  the  Foreign 
Minister,  explained  to  Adams.  It  was  only  Great  Britain's 
way  of  announcing  her  strict  neutrality.  Moreover,  Lincoln, 
by  his  proclamation  of  a  blockade  a  month  before,  had  virtu- 
ally recognized  the  South  as  a  belligerent  power.  For  all  that, 
England's  action  seemed  like  a  premature  expression  of  sym- 
pathy for  the  Montgomery  government,  and  it  certainly  gave 
encouragement  and  standing  to  the  Confederate  agents  who  had 
been  sent  abroad  to  purchase  supplies  and  win  the  favor  of  the 
European  powers. 

Toward  the  close  of  the  year  the  resentment  against  Great 
Britain  found  expression  in  a  dramatic  incident.  Messrs.  Mason 
and  Slidell,  commissioners  of  the  Confederate  government  to 
England  and  France  respectively,  passed  through  the  blockade 
and  on  November  7  boarded  the  British  mail  steamer  Trent 
at  Havana,  bound  for  Liverpool.  The  next  day  the  American 
sloop-of-war  San  JacintOj  Charles  Wilkes  captain,  stopped  the 
Trent  by  a  shot  across  her  bows  and  forcibly  removed  the  com- 
missioners, carrying  them  to  a  fort  in  Boston  Harbor.  The 
whole  North  rang  with  cheers  for  Captain  Wilkes.  He  was 
congratulated  by  Secretary  Welles,  feted  by  the  merchants 
of  Boston,  and  complimented  by  Congress.  Nevertheless,  his 
deed  was  a  violation  of  the  law  of  nations  and  of  the  very 
principle  which  we  had  fought  to  maintain  in  the  War  of  1812 
with  Great  Britain.  When  news  of  the  Trent  affair  reached 
England  the  ministry  dispatched  800  troops  to  Canada  and 
instructed  Lord  Lyons,  their  representative  at  Washington,  to 
demand  his  passports  if  the  prisoners  were  not  released  within 

master  it,  and  then  become  the  only  foreign  nation  [  ?]  steadily  contributing  in 
every  way  possible  to  verify  its  prejudgment"  (James  Schouler,  "History  of 
the  United  States,"  Vol.  VI,  p.  116). 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  617 

a  week.  But  Secretary  Seward  and  Charles  Sumner,  chairman 
of  the  Senate  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations,  had  already 
convinced  the  administration,  if  not  the  country,  of  the  injustice 
of  Wilkes's  action.  Seward  replied  to  Lord  Lyons  on  December 
26  that  Mason  and  Slidell  would  be  "cheerfully  liberated." 
They  were  put  on  board  an  English  steamer  at  Provincetown, 
Massachusetts,  and  the  incident  was  closed,  much  to  the  dis- 
appointment of  the  South  and  of  the  "war-mongers"  in  Eng- 
land, who  were  anxious  to  aid  in  the  disruption  of  the  Union. 
Naturally,  the  Trent  affair  did  not  help  to  smooth  the  relations 
of  the  United  States  with  Great  Britain. 

But  the  most  serious  matter  of  controversy  between  the  two 
countries  was  the  building  of  ships  in  British  yards  to  prey 
on  the  commerce  of  the  United  States.  An  act  of  Parliament  of 
1818  (the  Foreign-Enlistment  Act)  forbade  any  subject  of  the 
realm  to  "equip,  furnish,  fit  out,  or  arm  any  ship  to  be  employed 
in  the  service  of  a  foreign  state,  to  commit  hostilities  against  any 
state  at  peace  with  Great  Britain."  James  Bulloch  of  Georgia 
(a  maternal  uncle  of  Theodore  Roosevelt)  had  been  sent  to 
England  by  the  Confederate  government  to  buy  armed  ships 
to  molest  the  commerce  of  the  United  States.  He  secured  from 
eminent  English  lawyers  the  opinion  that  it  would  be  no  in- 
fringement of  the  Foreign-Enlistment  Act  to  build  ships  in  Great 
Britain  for  any  purpose,  provided  they  were  not  "equipped" 
there,  or  to  equip  and  arm  them  anywhere  outside  the  realm. 
On  the  strength  of  this  quibble  he  persuaded  the  shipbuilders 
of  the  Clyde  and  the  Mersey  to  set  to  work.  The  Oreto  was 
built  by  Laird  and  Sons  at  Birkenhead,  ostensibly  for  the 
Italian  government,  and  sailed  for  Nassau  in  March,  1862, 
where  she  was  fitted  out  with  her  armament  and,  under  the 
name  of  the  Florida,  was  run  into  Mobile  Bay.  The  "290," 
a  much  more  powerful  war  vessel,  was  under  construction  at  the 
same  yards  when  Adams  called  the  attention  of  the  ministry  to 
the  breach  of  neutrality  and  asked  that  the  vessel  be  detained. 
While  the  Collector  of  the  Customs,  the  Lords  of  the  Admiralty, 
the  crown  lawyers,  and  the  Attorney-General  were  conducting 
their  ponderous  campaign  of  cross  reference  over  the  case,  the 


618  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

"290"  was  completed.  She  slipped  out  of  Liverpool  the  day 
before  the  orders  for  her  detention  came  from  the  Solicitor- 
General.  Proceeding  to  the  Azores,  she  received  her  heavy 
armament  and  was  delivered  over  to  Captain  Semmes  of  the 
Confederate  navy  as  the  Alabama.1  The  Georgia  was  built  on 
the  Clyde  early  in  1863  and  armed  on  the  French  coast.  The 
Alexandra  (named  for  the  new  Princess  of  Wales)  was  built 
at  Liverpool  but  held  in  port  by  the  orders  of  the  government. 
After  a  long  process  in  the  courts  the  builders  were  acquitted 
of  breaking  the  Foreign-Enlistment  Act.  The  vessel,  however, 
was  not  delivered  to  the  Confederacy.  Finally,  Adams  made 
repeated,  and  as  he  feared  fruitless,  attempts  to  get  Earl  Russell 
to  detain  two  powerful  ironclad  rams  which  Bulloch  had  build- 
ing with  the  Lairds  at  Birkenhead.  On  September  5,  1863, 
Adams  wrote  to  Russell  in  the  language  of  an  ultimatum,  "It 
would  be  superfluous  in  me  to  point  out  to  your  lordship  that 
this  is  war."  But  the  ministry,  instructed  by  the  case  of  the 
Alabama,  and  impressed  by  the  victories  of  Gettysburg  and 
Vicksburg,  had  already  given  orders  two  days  before  to  have 
the  rams  detained.  With  this  virtual  confession  of  her  un- 
neutral  conduct,  Great  Britain  ceased  to  give  aid  and  comfort 
to  the  Confederacy. 

The  damage  wrought  by  these  commerce-destroyers  was  enor- 
mous. The  merchant  fleet  of  the  United  States  was  practically 
driven  from  the  ocean.  "The  Georgia,  on  her  second  voyage," 
said  W.  E.  Forster  in  Parliament,  "did  not  meet  a  single  Ameri- 
can vessel  in  six  weeks,  though  she  saw  more  than  70  vessels 
in  a  few  days."  The  Alabama  alone  destroyed  more  than  60 
American  merchant  ships  before  she  was  sunk  by  the  Kear- 
sarge  off  the  coast  of  Cherbourg,  France,  in  a  spectacular 
battle,  June  19,  1864.  The  Shenandoah  was  still  roaming  the 
Pacific  in  search  of  her  prey  weeks  after  the  war  had  ceased.2 

1  Jefferson  Davis  said  later,  "There  was  no  secrecy  about  the  building  of 
the  Alabama." 

2  The  story  of  England's  reparation  for  the  damage  done  by  these  vessels,  as 
determined  by  the  adjudication  of  the  "Alabama  claims"  at  Geneva,  in  1872, 
belongs  to  a  later  chapter. 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  619 

Napoleon's  rash  venture  can  be  disposed  of  in  a  few  words. 
Mexico,  enormously  rich  in  undeveloped  natural  resource^  but 
distracted  by  revolution  and  burdened  with  debt,  had  offered 
a  tempting  field  for  foreign  invasion  ever  since  her  independ- 
ence from  Spain.  In  the  autumn  of  1861  Great  Britain, 
France,  and  Spain  agreed  at  London  on  a  joint  expedition  to 
Mexico  to  force  the  payment  of  her  debts  to  them  and  the 
better  protection  of  their  citizens.  Great  Britain  and  Spain 
withdrew  their  fleets  in  the  spring  of  1862  ;  but  Napoleon  de- 
termined to  overthrow  the  government  of  President  Juarez  and 
set  up  a  state  to  his  own  liking  in  Mexico.  Under  General 
Forey  and  Marshal  Bazaine  35,000  French  soldiers  fought 
their  way  up  to  Mexico  City,  where  Bazaine  organized  a  "gov- 
ernment" of  subservient  factionists,  who  formally  offered  the 
crown  of  the  "Mexican  Empire"  to  Napoleon's  candidate,  the 
Archduke  Maximilian  of  Austria.  That  inoffensive  and  deb- 
onair prince,  in  an  evil  hour  for  his  own  happiness,  accepted 
the  precarious  honor  in  an  elaborate  ceremony  at  his  palace 
of  Miramar,  on  the  Adriatic.  In  June,  1864,  he  arrived  in 
Mexico  to  rule  his  strange  and  unwilling  subjects. 

The  government  at  Washington  kept  a  watchful  eye  on  all 
these  proceedings,  although,  much  to  the  disappointment  of  the 
South,  it  refused  to  be  diverted  by  them  from  its  main  task  of 
winning  the  war.  Seward  warned  Napoleon,  in  mildly  remon- 
strative  dispatches,  that  Mexico  must  enjoy  a  government  of 
its  own  choice,  and  seemed  willing  for  the  time  being  to  believe 
Napoleon's  protestations  that  that  was  just  what  he  was  trying 
to  give  her.  In  spite  of  a  belligerent  resolution  by  the  House,1 
in  April,  1864,  the  administration  held  to  its  noncommittal 

1The  resolution  was  proposed  by  Henry  Winter  Davis,  whose  opposition  to 
Lincoln's  10  per  cent  plan  for  the  reconstruction  of  the  Southern  states  we  have 
already  studied  (p.  599).  It  declared  that  "it  does  not  accord  with  the  policy 
of  the  United  States  to  acknowledge  any  monarchical  government  erected  on 
the  ruins  of  any  republican  government  in  America,  under  the  auspices  of  any 
European  power."  The  South,  hoping  that  the  United  States  and  France  would 
become  embroiled,  taunted  Seward  for  his  "gingerly"  handling  of  the  Mexican 
situation,  accusing  the  administration  of  "arrant  cowardice"  for  not  vindicating 
the  Monroe  Doctrine. 


620  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

course,  refusing  to  be  stampeded  into  a  war  with  France.  As 
soon. as  the  Civil  War  was  over,  however,  General  Sheridan 
was  sent  to  the  Texas  border  as  a  warning  that  the  forbearance 
of  the  United  States  respecting  this  flagrant  violation  of  the 
sovereignty  of  the  Mexican  Republic  was  at  an  end.  The  story 
of  the  withdrawal  of  the  French  troops  and  the  seizure  and  exe- 
cution of  the  guileless  puppet  "Emperor"  Maximilian  belongs 
to  a  later  chapter. 

On  the  fourteenth  of  April,  1865,  the  fourth  anniversary  of 
the  surrender  of  Fort  Sumter,  a  great  celebration  was  held  in 
Charleston.  At  high  noon  General  Anderson  raised  above  the 
ruined  walls  of  Sumter  the  same  tattered  flag  that  he  had  hauled 
down,  while  the  guns  from  all  the  forts  which  had  opened  fire 
on  that  flag,  in  the  gray  dawn  four  years  before,  now  greeted 
it  with  the  national  salute.  At  the  banquet  in  the  evening,  in 
the  city  of  Rhett  and  Calhoun,  the  list  of  speakers  included 
the  name  of  William  Lloyd  Garrison.  That  same  evening, 
President  Lincoln,  relieved  from  the  awful  burden  of  four 
years,  was  seated  with  his  wife  and  friends  in  a  box  at  Ford's 
theater,  when  a  self-appointed  avenger  of  the  defeated  South, 
a  half-deranged  actor  named  John  Wilkes  Booth,  stole  up  be- 
hind him  and  shot  him  in  the  back  of  the  head.  The  President 
was  carried  unconscious  to  a  house  across  the  street,  where  he 
lingered  till  morning.  At  7.21  his  fitful  breathing  ceased  and 
the  low  moans  were  stilled.  Stanton,  with  streaming  eyes,  pro- 
nounced his  epitaph:  "Now  he  belongs  to  the  ages." 

"Sic  semper  tyrannis ! "  was  Booth's  cry  as  he  leaped  from  the 
President's  box  to  the  stage  of  the  theater — "So  be  it  ever  to 
tyrants !  "  But  no  single  trait  of  the  tyrant's  nature — pride, 
passion,  cruelty,  fear,  suspicion,  hate — found  a  place  in  Abra- 
ham Lincoln's  noble  heart.  If  he  was,  as  Stanton  said,  "the  most 
perfect  ruler  of  men  that  ever  lived,"  it  was  because  his  large 
sympathy  embraced  all  the  springs  and  motives  of  men's  deeds. 
He  never  wished  to  rule,  but  only  to  "know  and  understand." 
"Come,  now,  let  us  reason  together,"  was  the  divine  invitation 
forever  on  his  lips.  And  his  justice  was  "likest  God's"  because 
mercy  tempered  it.  His  mind  was  already  wholly  occupied  with 


THE  CIVIL  WAR  621 

the  healing  of  the  nation's  wounds.  Three  days  before  his  assas- 
sination he  spoke,  in  his  last  public  utterance,  from  the  balcony 
of  the  White  House,  of  an  announcement  which  he  intended  to 
make  to  the  people  of  the  South.  In  a  last  cabinet  meeting  on 
his  last  day,  his  words  were  all  of  kindness  and  sympathy  for 
his  fellow  citizens  who  had  been  restored  to  the  Union.  He  died 
at  a  moment  propitious  for  his  fame,  quit  of  the  greatest  serv- 
ice that  a  man  can  do — the  saving  of  the  state.  His  name, 
with  Washington's,  will  forever  be  a  priceless  heritage  to  the 
generations  of  our  Republic. 

Our  children  shall  behold  his  fame, 

The  kindly-earnest,  brave,  foreseeing  man, 

Sagacious,  patient,  dreading  praise  not  blame, 
New  birth  of  our  new  soil,  the  first  American. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The  appended  bibliography  makes  no  claim  to  exhaustiveness.  It  is 
carefully  selected  with  a  view  to  the  time  available  to  the  college  student 
for  collateral  reading  and  study.  Lists  of  hundreds  of  titles  of  reference 
at  the  end  of  each  chapter,  though  they  may  show  the  erudition  of  the 
author,  can  be  only  a  source  of  confusion  and  discouragement  to  the  stu- 
dent. Ponderous  collections  of  State  papers,  court  decisions,  congressional 
debates,  executive  documents,  and  the  like  are  for  the  use  of  advanced 
graduate  students  and  special  investigators.  The  more  modest  lists  that 
are  given  here  contain  books  which  are  easily  accessible  to  the  college 
student  and  in  which  he  may  be  expected  to  do  considerable  reading. 

An  almost  indispensable  work  of  reference  for  the  student  of  American 
history  is  the  set  of  twenty-eight  volumes  entitled  The  American  Nation 
(Harper  &  Brothers),  edited  by  A.  B.  Hart.  Each  volume  is  written  by  a 
recognized  scholar  in  the  field,  is  based  on  the  sources,  and  is  provided  with 
excellent  maps,  notes,  and  references.  The  important  maps  in  this  series 
have  been  collected  in  a  volume  entitled  Harper's  Atlas  of  American  His- 
tory (New  York,  1920),  and  supplemented  by  valuable  "Map  Studies" 
by  Dixon  Ryan  Fox.  The  story  of  American  history  is  covered  in  briefer 
space  by  the  four  volumes  called  The  Riverside  History  of  the  United 
States,  edited  by  W.  E.  Dodd  (Houghton  Mififlin  Company).  A  third  set, 
of  fifty  volumes,  The  Chronicles  of  America,  published  by  the  Yale  Uni- 
versity Press,  under  the  editorship  of  Allen  Johnson,  leaves  nothing  to  be 
desired  in  the  way  of  scholarship,  style,  or  workmanship.  Professor  Edward 
Channing  has  been  engaged  for  more  than  twenty-five  years  in  the  arduous 
task  of  writing  a  History  of  the  United  States  from  the  days  of  Columbus. 
The  fifth  volume  of  this  highly  authoritative  work  (The  Macmillan  Com- 
pany, 1921)  brings  the  narrative  down  to  the  year  1848.  The  eight  large 
volumes  of  John  Bach  McMaster's  History  of  the  People  of  the  United 
States  (D.  Appleton  and  Company,  1883-1913)  cover  the  period  from  the 
close  of  the  American  Revolution  to  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil  War,  with 
especial  attention  to  the  social  and  industrial  life  of  the  people.  James 
Schouler's  History  of  the  United  States,  in  seven  volumes  (Dodd,  Mead  & 
Company,  1880-1913),  is  a  purely  political  history  of  our  country  to  the 
close  of  the  Reconstruction  period,  with  a  marked  tendency  in  favor  of  the 
New  England  view  of  national  policies.  James  Ford  Rhodes  has  given  us 


ii  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

a  masterly  treatise  on  the  history  of  slavery,  the  Civil  War,  and  Recon- 
struction in  his  seven-volume  History  of  the  United  States  from  the 
Compromise  of  1850  (The  Macmillan  Company  1892-1906),  which  is 
characterized  by  impartial  judgment  and  great  dignity  and  charm  of  style. 
An  eighth  volume  (1919),  covering  the  period  from  1877  to  1897,  is  less 
impressive. 

No  secondary  work  on  history,  however  skillfully  constructed  or  vividJy 
presented,  can  give  the  student  the  same  sense  of  the  reality  of  the  persons 
or  the  events  of  the  past  that  he  gets  from  the  words  t)f  the  actors  them- 
selves. It  is  therefore  highly  desirable  that  the  student  should  be  in  fre- 
quent touch  with  the  sources  of  the  narrative.  Convenient  collections  of 
sources  are  Original  Narratives  of  Early  American  History  (18  vols., 
ed.  J.  Franklin  Jameson)  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons,  1906-1917),  illus- 
trating the  founding  and  the  history  of  the  various  colonies ;  American  His- 
tory told  by  Contemporaries  (4  vols.,  ed.  A.  B.  Hart)  (The  Macmillan 
Company,  1897-1900),  containing  a  great  variety  of  selections  from  letters, 
speeches,  debates,  journals,  tracts,  travels,  and  poems,  covering  the  whole 
period  of  our  history  to  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  century ;  A  Documen- 
tary Source  Book  of  American  History,  1606-1913  (ed.  William  Mac- 
Donald)  (The  Macmillan  Company,  1908),  containing  political  documents 
only,  such  as  charters,  legislative  acts,  proclamations,  and  treaties. 

The  works  of  American  statesmen  from  Benjamin  Franklin  down  have 
been  published  in  editions  too  numerous  to  catalogue  here. 

The  story  of  our  industrial  and  economic  development  is  well  told  in 
E.  L.  Bogart's  Economic  History  of  the  United  States  (Longmans,  Green 
&  Co.,  1912)  and  Katharine  Coman's  Industrial  History  of  the  United 
States  (The  Macmillan  Company,  1911).  G.  S.  Callender's  Selections  from 
the  Economic  History  of  the  United  States,  1765-1860  (Ginn  and  Com- 
pany, 1909)  is  a  collection  of  important  economic  sources,  with  valuable 
essays  introducing  each  chapter. 

The  seventh  volume  of  The  Cambridge  Modern  History  (The  Mac- 
millan Company,  1906)  is  devoted  to  the  United  States.  A  feature  of  the 
volume  is  the  extensive  bibliography  filling  eighty-one  large  octavo  pages. 

The  plan  followed  in  the  present  bibliography  is  to  cite  first  a  few  of 
the  most  important  general  works  on  the  period  dealt  with  in  the  chapter 
and  then  to  give  specific  references  on  certain  topics  emphasized.  These 
latter  references  will  help  the  student  in  pursuing  a  subject  which  may 
have  particularly  interested  him,  and  they  may  be  used  by  the  instructor 
in  assigning  special  investigations  and  reports. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  iii 

CHAPTER  I 
THE  COLONIAL  BACKGROUND 

H.  L.  Osgood's  The  American  Colonies  in  the  i?th  Century  (3  vols.) 
(The  Macmillan  Company)  is  the  standard  work  on  the  period  of  the 
settlement  and  the  early  history  of  the  colonies.  It  is  particularly  strong 
on  the  political  and  institutional  side  of  colonial  history,  and  may  be  sup- 
plemented on  the  economic  side  by  G.  L.  Beer's  The  Origins  of  the  British 
Colonial  System,  1578-1660,  The  Old  Colonial  System,  1660-1754,  and 
British  Colonial  Policy,  1754-1765  (The  Macmillan  Company);  also  by 
W.  B.  Weeden's  The  Economic  and  Social  History  of  New  England,  1620- 
1789  (2  vols.)  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company)  and  P.  A.  Bruce's  Economic 
History  of  Virginia  in  the  i^th  Century  (2  vols.)  (The  Macmillan  Com- 
pany). For  the  eighteenth  century  we  have  no  such  comprehensive  work 
as  Osgood's.  Good  treatments  in  single  volumes  are  E.  B.  Greene's  Pro- 
vincial America,  1690-1740  (Harper  &  Brothers),  J.  A.  Doyle's  The  Colonies 
under  the  House  of  Hanover  (Henry  Holt  and  Company),  and  O.  M. 
Dickerson's  American  Colonial  Government,  1696-1765  (A.  H.  Clark  and 
Co.).  John  Fiske,  in  his  Old  Virginia  and  .her  Neighbours  (2  vols.),  The 
Beginnings  of  New  England,  and  Dutch  and  Quaker  Colonies  in  America 
(2  vols.)  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  has  given  us  a  vivid,  popular 
story  of  the  early  settlers.  Edward  Eggleston's  The  Transit  of  Civiliza- 
tion from  England  to  America  in  the  i^th  Century  (D.  Appleton  and 
Company)  and  C.  McL.  Andrews's  Colonial  Folkways  (Yale  Univer- 
sity Press)  are  interesting  treatments  of  the  social  history  of  the  colonies. 
For  the  French  in  America  see  Francis  Parkman's  great  work,  especially 
the  volumes  entitled  The  Old  Regime  in  Canada,  Count  Frontenac  and 
New  France  under  Louis  XIV,  A  Half  Century  of  Conflict,  and  Montcalm 
and  Wolfe  (Little,  Brown  and  Company) ;  also  R.  G.  Thwaites's  France  in 
America  (Harper  &  Brothers),  A.  G.  Bradley's  The  Fight  with  France  for 
the  New  World  (A.  Constable  and  Co.),  Wm.  B.  Munro's  Crusaders  of 
New  France  (Yale  University  Press),  and  G.  M.  Wrong's  The  Conquest 
of  New  France  (Yale  University  Press).  A  wealth  of  source  material  may 
be  found  in  the  Original  Narratives  of  Early  American  History.  The  pe- 
riod treated  in  this  chapter  is  covered  by  Channing,  Vols.  I,  II;  The 
Riverside  History,  Vol.  I  (by  C.  L.  Becker) ;  The  American  Nation,  Vols. 
IV-VII;  and  The  Chronicles  of  America,  Vols.  III-X. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

i.  Foreign  Elements  in  our  Early  Population :  CHANNING,  Vol.  II, 
chap,  xiv;  H.  P.  FAIRCHILD,  Immigration,  chap,  ii;  G.  C.  LEE,  History  of 
North  America,  Vol.  IV,  chaps,  i,  ii  (Dutch  and  Swedish) ;  LUCY  F.  BIT- 


iv  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

TINGER,  The  Germans  in  Colonial  Times;  H.  E.  JACOBS,  German  Emigra- 
tion to  America,  1709-1740  (Pennsylvania  German  Society,  Proceedings, 
Vol.  VIII)  (with  interesting  illustrations) ;  CHARLES  BAIRD,  The  Huguenot 
Emigration  to  America,  Vol.  I,  chap,  ii,  and  Vol.  II,  chaps,  xi-xiv ;  A.  M. 
SCHLESINGER,  The  Significance  of  Immigration  in  American  History  (Amer- 
ican Journal  of  Sociology,  Vol.  XXVII,  No.  i). 

2.  Social  and  Economic  Conditions  in  Seventeenth-Century  England: 
G.  P.  GOOCH,  English  Democratic  Ideals  in  the  i^th  Century,  chap,  viii; 
R.  H.  GRETTON,  The  English  Middle  Class,  chaps,  v-viii;  WILLIAM  CUN- 
NINGHAM, The  Growth  of  English  Industry  and  Commerce  in  Modern 
Times,  Vol.  I,  pp.  285-330.    Consult  also  bibliography  in  E.  P.  Cheyney's 
The  European  Background  of  American  History,  pp.  327-331. 

3.  The  Acts  of  Trade :    CHANNING,  Vol.  II,  chaps,  i,  viii;  G.  L.  BEER, 
The  Old  Colonial  System,  Part  I,  chaps,  i-iv,  and  The  Commercial  Policy 
of  England  toward  the  American  Colonies  (Columbia  University  Studies, 
Vol.  Ill,  No.   2);   C.  M.  ANDREWS,  British   Committees,  Commissions, 
and  Councils  of  Trade  and  Plantations,  1622-1675  (Johns  Hopkins  Uni- 
versity Studies,  Series  XXVI,  Vols.  I-III) ;  HART,  Contemporaries,  Vol.  II, 
Nos.  45,  46,  67,  85,  87,  131. 

4.  Contrast  between  the  English  and  the  French  System  of  Colonial 
Government :     FRANCIS  PARKMAN,  The  Old  Regime  in  Canada,  chaps,  xvi- 
xix;  J.  G.  BOURINOT,  Local  Government  in  Canada  (Johns  Hopkins  Uni- 
versity Studies,  Series  V,  Vols.  V,  VI);  JOSEPH  WALLACE,  Illinois  and 
Louisiana  under  the  French  Rule ;  R.  G.  THWAITES,  France  in  America, 
chap,  viii ;  E.  B.  GREENE,  Provincial  America,  chaps,  iii-viii,  XL 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  AMERICAN  REVOLUTION 

Out  of  the  enormous  mass  of  literature  on  the  American  Revolution  a 
few  works  are  cited  here,  the  purpose  of  the  selection  being  chiefly  to  give 
the  student  an  idea  of  the  various  interpretations  of  that  basal  event  of  our 
history.  G.  O.  Trevelyan's  The  American  Revolution  (Longmans,  Green 
&  Co.)  is  a  fascinating  work  by  a  great  English  scholar  whose  sympathies 
are  with  the  Americans  in  their  struggle  against  the  Tory  program  of 
George  III.  John  Fiske's  The  American  Revolution  (2  vols.)  (Houghton 
Mifflin  Company)  is  a  lively  narrative,  less  critical  than  Trevelyan's,  but 
no  less  favorable  to  the  American  cause.  The  Tory  view  is  presented 
in  Belcher's  The  First  American  Civil  War  (The  Macmillan  Company), 
Sidney  G.  Fisher's  The  Struggle  for  American  Independence  (2  vols.) 
(J.  B.  Lippincott  Company),  and  Arthur  Johnston's  Myths  and  Facts  of 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  v 

the  American  Revolution  (Briggs,  Toronto).  Accurate  and  impartial  treat- 
ments in  single  volumes  may  be  found  in  W.  E.  H.  Lecky's  The  American 
Revolution  (D.  Appleton  and  Company),  edited  by  J.  A.  Woodburn  from 
passages  in  Lecky's  History  of  England  in  the  i8th  Century ;  Edward  Chan- 
ning's  History  of  the  United  States,  Vol.  Ill  (The  Macmillan  Company), 
with  strong  emphasis  on  economic  factors;  G.  E.  Howard's  The  Prelimi- 
naries of  the  Revolution  (Harper  &  Brothers) ;  and  C.  H.  Van  Tyne's  The 
American  Revolution  (Harper  &  Brothers).  A  most  valuable  repository 
of  the  views  of  contemporary  writers  is  M.  C.  Tyler's  Literary  History  of 
the  American  Revolution  (2  vols.)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons).  A.  M.  Schle- 
singer's  Colonial  Merchants  and  the  American  Revolution  (Columbia 
University  Press)  is  an  exhaustive  study  of  the  commercial  controversy. 
For  extensive  lists  of  titles  on  the  military,  political,  and  diplomatic  his- 
tory of  the  Revolution,  for  the  war  in  the  West,  and  for  the  French  aid, 
see  the  bibliographies  in  the  Cambridge  Modern  History,  Vol.  VII,  pp. 
780-784,  and  Van  Tyne's  The  American  Revolution,  pp.  334-355. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  The  Tories  in  the  Revolution :    C.  H.  VAN  TYNE,  The  Loyalists  in 
the  American  Revolution;  J.  H.  STARK,  The  Loyalists  of  Massachusetts; 
A.  C.  FLICK,  Loyalism  in  New  York  during  the  American  Revolution; 
J.  K.  HOSMER,  Thomas  Hutchinson;   Massachusetts  Historical  Society, 
Proceedings,  Series  II,  Vols.  Ill,  IV;  M.  C.  TYLER,  The  Party  of  the 
Loyalists  in  the  American  Revolution  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol. 
I,  pp.  24  ff.),  and  Literary  History  of  the  American  Revolution,  Vol.  I, 
pp.  293-383 ;  HART,  Contemporaries,  Vol.  II,  Nos.   138,  154,  156-158, 
166-169. 

2.  The  War  on  the  Frontier :    F.  J.  TURNER,  George  Rogers  Clark  and 
the  Kaskaskia  Campaign  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  Ill,  pp.  491  ff. 
and  506  ff.) ;  W.  H.  ENGLISH,  Conquest  of  the  Country  Northwest  of  the 
River  Ohio ;  Illinois  Historical  Collections,  Vol.  I ;  THEODORE  ROOSEVELT, 
The  Winning  of  the  West,  Vols.  II,  III;  F.  A.  OGG,  The  Old  Northwest 
(Chronicles  of  America,  Vol.  XIX),  chaps,  ii-iv. 

3.  French  Aid  in  the  Revolution :    C.  H.  VAN  TYNE,  Influences  which 
determined  the  French  Government  to  make  a  Treaty  with  America  in 
1778  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  XXI,  pp.  528  ff.);  J.  JUSSERAND, 
With  Americans  of  Past  and  Present  Days,  chap,  i  (Rochambeau) ;  ELIZ- 
ABETH S.  KITE,  Beaumarchais  and  the  War  of  American  Independence; 
CHARLEMAGNE  TOWER,  The  Marquis  de  Lafayette  and  the  American  Rev- 
olution; Old  South  Leaflets,  No.  97  (Lafayette);  E.  S.  CORWIN,  French 
Politics  and  the  American  Alliance  of  1778. 


vi  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

4.  The  Declaration  of  Independence :  HERBERT  FRIEDENWALD,  The  Dec- 
laration of  Independence,  chaps,  vii-ix  (the  purpose  and  philosophy  of 
the  Declaration),  chaps,  x,  xi  (analysis  of  the  grievances  cited);  MELLEN 
CHAMBERLAIN,  The  Declaration  of  Independence  (Massachusetts  Histori- 
cal Society,  Proceedings,  Series  II,  Vol.  I);  John  H.  Hazelton,  The  Dec- 
laration of  Independence,  chap,  vi,  "Drafting  the  Declaration"  (valuable 
for  original  material  and  facsimiles) ;  C.  E.  MERRIAM,  The  Political  Theory 
of  Thomas  Jefferson  (Political  Science  Quarterly,  Vol.  XVII,  pp.  24  ff.). 

CHAPTER  III 
FOUNDING  THE  NATIONAL  GOVERNMENT 

John  Fiske's  Critical  Period  of  American  History  (Houghton  Mifflin 
Company)  is  an  excellent  account  of  the  difficulties  and  dangers  which 
our  country  passed  through  in  the  years  from  the  close  of  the  Revolution 
to  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution.  A  more  extended  treatment,  em- 
phasizing the  currents  of  public  opinion,  may  be  found  in  the  first 
volume  of  J.  B.  McMaster's  History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States 
(D.  Appleton  and  Company).  A.  C.  McLaughlin's  Confederation  and 
the  Constitution  (Harper  &  Brothers)  is  one  of  the  most  scholarly  and 
illuminating  volumes  in  the  American  Nation  Series.  In  Justin  Win- 
sor's  Narrative  and  Critical  History  of  America  (Houghton  Mifflin  Com- 
pany), Vol.  VII,  there  are  valuable  essays  entitled  The  Confederation, 
1781-1789,  by  Justin  Winsor,  and  The  Constitution  of  the  United  States 
and  its  History,  by  George  T.  Curtis.  Max  Farrand's  Records  of  the 
Federal  Convention  (Yale  University  Press),  in  three  large  volumes, 
furnishes  ample  material  for  the  study  of  the  debates,  minutes,  and  cor- 
respondence of  the  members  of  the  Convention.  The  author  has  con- 
densed the  most  important  material  into  a  single  volume  entitled  The 
Framing  of  the  Constitution  (Yale  University  Press).  C.  A.  Beard's 
An  Economic  Interpretation  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States 
(The  Macmillan  Company)  presents  the  Constitution  as  a  conservative 
document  registering  the  victory  of  the  security-holders  over  the  farmers. 
The  Federalist  is  carefully  edited  by  P.  L.  Ford,  with  an  excellent  intro- 
duction (Henry  Holt  and  Company).  The  same  author's  Essays  on  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States  (Brooklyn)  contains  over  eighty  public 
letters  written  by  well-known  men  of  the  period,  including  five  signers 
of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  and  seven  members  of  the  Federal 
Convention.  For  discussions  of  the  power  of  the  Federal  government 
under  the  Constitution,  see  James  Bryce's  American  Commonwealth 
(abridged  edition)  (The  Macmillan  Company),  chaps,  iii-xxvi.  Everett 
Kimball's  National  Government  of  the  United  States  (Ginn  and  Com- 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  vii 

pany)  is  an  excellent  account  of  the  structure  and  working  of  our  Fed- 
eral system,  as  is  also  J.  A.  Smith's  Spirit  of  American  Government 
(The  Macmillan  Company).  William  MacDonald's  A  New  Constitu- 
tion for  a  New  America  (B.  W.  Huebsch)  is  a  bold  plea  for  a  thorough 
revision  of  the  Constitution.  Carefully  selected  source  material  may  be 
found  in  Allen  Johnson's  Readings  in  American  Constitutional  History 
(Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  C.  A.  Beard's  Readings  in  American  Gov- 
ernment and  Politics  (The  Macmillan  Company),  and  Hart's  American 
History  told  by  Contemporaries  (The  Macmillan  Company). 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  Foreign  Relations  under  the  Confederation:    J.  W.  FOSTER,  A  Cen- 
tury of  American  Diplomacy,  chap,  iii,  McMASTER,  Vol.  I,  chaps,  iii,  iv; 
LEON  FRASER,  English  Opinion  of  the  American  Constitution  and  Govern- 
ment, 1783-1798 ;  A.  C.  MCLAUGHLIN,  The  Western  Posts  and  the  British 
Debts  (American  Historical  Association  Reports,  1894) ;  F.  A.  OGG,  The 
Opening  of  the  Mississippi,  pp.  400-460 ;  W.  C.  FORD.  The  United  States 
and  Spain  in  1790  (introduction) ;  and  articles  on  the  Spanish  intrigues  in 
the  West  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  VIII,  p.  5 ;  Vol.  IX,  p.  748 ; 
and  Vol.  X,  p.  817). 

2 .  The  Origins  of  our  National  Domain  :    B.  A.  HINSDALE,   The  Old 
Northwest,  the  Beginnings  of  our  Colonial  System;  JUSTIN  WINSOR,  The 
Westward  Movement,  chaps,  xxii,  xxiii;  R.  L.  SCHUYLER,  Working  to- 
wards a  National  Domain   (Political  Science  Quarterly,  Vol.   XXVIII, 
p.  496);  H.  B.  ADAMS,  Maryland's  Influence  upon  Land  Cessions  to  the 
United  States  (Johns  Hopkins  University  Studies,  Series  III,  Vol.  I); 
THOMAS  DONALDSON,  The  Public  Domain,  chaps,  v,  vi  (Report  of  the 
Public  Land  Commission,  1881);  PAYSON  J.  TREAT,  The  National  Land 
System,  chaps,  i-iii. 

3.  Opposition  to  the  Constitution  :    P.  L.  FORD,  Pamphlets  on  the  Con- 
stitution, p.  329;  HART,  Contemporaries,  Vol.  Ill,  Nos.  70,  71,  73-75; 
A.  C.  MCLAUGHLIN,  The  Confederation  and  the  Constitution,  pp.  297-317; 
The  Federalist  (ed.  P.  L.  Ford),  introduction,  pp.  xix-xxix;  C.  E.  MINER, 
The  Ratification  of  the  Federal  Constitution  by  the  State  of  New  York', 
S.  B.  HARDING,  The  Contest  over  the  Ratification  of  the  Federal  Consti- 
tution in  the  State  of  Massachusetts  (Harvard  Historical  Studies,  Vol.  II) ; 
A.  J.  BEVERIDGE,  The  Life  of  John  Marshall,  Vol.  I,  chaps,  ix-xii. 

4.  The  Supreme  Court :   C.  A.  BEARD,   The  Supreme  Court  and  the 
Constitution ;  B.  F.  MOORE,  The  Supreme  Court  and  Unconstitutional  Leg- 
islation', E.  S.  CORWIN,  John  Marshall  and  the  Constitution  (Chronicles 
of  America,  Vol.  XVI);  W.  W.  WILLOUGHBY,  The  Supreme  Court  of  the 


viii  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

United  States :  its  History  and  Influence  on  our  Constitutional  System', 
EVERETT  KIMBALL,  The  National  Government  of  the  United  States,  chaps, 
xv,  xvi ;  WILLIAM  MACDONALD,  A  New  Constitution  for  a  New  America, 
chaps,  xvii,  xviii. 

CHAPTER  IV 
WASHINGTON  AND  ADAMS 

Of  the  older  standard  treatments  of  the  period  from  1789  to  1801, 
Richard  Hildreth's  History  of  the  United  States  (Harper  &  Brothers), 
Series  II,  Vols.  IV,  V  (chaps,  i-xv),  inclines  strongly  to  the  Federalist  side 
while  James  Schouler's  History  of  the  United  States  (Dodd,  Mead  & 
Company),  Vol.  I,  chaps,  ii-iv,  gives  the  Jeffersonian  Republican  due  em- 
phasis. J.  S.  Bassett's  Federalist  System  (Harper  &  Brothers)  is  a  clear, 
impartial  treatment  which  will  serve  the  student  better  than  any  other 
single  volume  on  the  period.  Edward  Channing's  History  of  the  United 
States  (The  Macmillan  Company),  Vol.  IV,  chaps,  i-viii,  and  J.  B. 
McMaster's  History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States  (D.  Appleton  and 
Company),  Vols.  I,  II,  chaps,  vi-xi,  are  excellent  general  accounts.  The 
development  of  parties  may  be  studied  in  J.  A.  Woodburn's  American 
Political  History  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons),  chap,  ii,  or  J.  P.  Gordy's  History 
of  Political  Parties  in  the  United  States  (Henry  Holt  and  Company) ,  Vol. 
I,  chaps,  i-xxii.  W.  H.  Trescot's  Diplomatic  History  of  the  Administra- 
tions of  Washington  and  Adams  (Little,  Brown  and  Company),  al- 
though an  old  book,  is  still  extremely  valuable.  It  may  be  supplemented 
by  C.  R.  Fish's  American  Diplomacy  (Henry  Holt  and  Company),  chaps, 
viii-xi.  D.  R.  Dewey's  Financial  History  of  the  United  States  (Longmans, 
Green  &  Co.),  chaps,  iv,  v,  contains  an  excellent  account  of  the  measures 
of  Alexander  Hamilton.  C.  A.  Beard's  Economic  Origins  of  Jeffersonian 
Democracy  (The  Macmillan  Company)  is  a  masterly  presentation  of  the 
struggle  between  the  farmers  and  the  security-holders  in  the  last  decade 
of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  following  collections  of  the  works  of  the 
greatest  statesmen  of  the  period  are  recommended  :  The  Writings  of  George 
Washington  (14  vols.,  ed.  W.  C.  Ford)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons),  The 
Works  of  John  Adams  (10  vols.,  ed.  C.  F.  Adams)  (Little,  Brown  and 
Company),  The  Works  of  Alexander  Hamilton  (12  vols.,  ed.  H.  C.  Lodge) 
(G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons),  and  The  Writings  of  Thomas  Jefferson  (10  vols., 
ed.  P.  L.  Ford)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons).  For  selections  from  sources  see 
Hart's  Contemporaries  (The  Macmillan  Company),  Vol.  Ill,  Nos.  83-105; 
William  MacDonald's  Documentary  Source  Book  of  American  History 
(The  Macmillan  Company),  Nos.  54-64 ;  and  Allen  Johnson's  Readings  in 
American  Constitutional  History  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  Part  III. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  ix 

A  vivid  and  caustic  commentary  on  the  first  two  years  of  Washington's 
administration,  by  a  disaffected  senator  from  Pennsylvania,  is  found  in  the 
Journal  of  William  Maclay  (D.  Appleton  and  Company).  An  exhaustive 
bibliography  of  the  period,  including  references  to  debates  in  Congress, 
journals  of  the  Houses,  State  papers,  and  manuscripts  of  the  statesmen,  can 
be  found  in  the  appendix  of  Bassett's  Federal  System,  pp.  299-305. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  Social  Conditions  in  George  Washington's  Day :  MCMASTER,  Vol.  I, 
pp.  i-ioi,  and  Vol.  II,  pp.  1-24;  CHANNING,  Vol.  IV,  chap,  i;  JUSTIN 
WINSOR,  The  Westward  Movement,  pp.   398-414;   TIMOTHY  DWIGHT, 
Travels  in  New  England  and  New  York,  1796-1815,  Vol.  I ;  J.  P.  BRISSOT 
DE  WARVILLE,  New  Travels  in  the  United  States,  1778',   ISAAC  WELD, 
Travels  through  the  States  of  North  America  and  Canada,  1795-1797  (2 
vols.)  (passim);  R.  W.  GRISWOLD,  The  Republican  Court  (passim). 

2.  The  Virginia  and  Kentucky  Resolutions :  Text  in  MACDONALD,  Nos. 
61-64;  F.  M.  ANDERSON,  Contemporary  Opinion  of  the  Virginia  and  Ken- 
tucky Resolutions  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  V,  pp.  45  ff.,  225  ff.) ; 
H.  V.  AMES,  State  Documents  on  Federal  Relations,  No.  i,  pp.  18-26; 
The  Writings  of  James  Madison  (ed.  Gaillard  Hunt),  Vol.  VI,  pp.  341- 
407;   E.  P.  POWELL,  Nullification  and  Secession  in  the  United  States, 
chap,  ii;  E.  D.  WARFIELD,  The  Kentucky  Resolutions  of  1798. 

3.  Was  Hamilton's  Tariff  Protective?  F.  W.  TAUSSIG,  The  Tariff  His- 
tory of  the  United  States,  chaps,  i,  ii;  The  Annals  of  Congress,  1789-1791, 
Vol.  I,  pp.   192-231,  291-317,  324-336;   EDWARD  STANWOOD,  American 
Tariff  Controversies  in  the  igth  Century,  Vol.  I,  chap,  iii;  J.  L.  BISHOP, 
A  History  of  American  Manufactures,  Vol.  I,  chap,  x;  F.  W.  TAUSSIG, 
State  Papers  and  Speeches  on  the  Tariff,  pp.  1-107;  F.  S.  OLIVER,  Alex- 
ander Hamilton,  pp.  228-240. 

"4.  New  Light  on  Citizen  Genet's  Mission :  F.  J.  TURNER,  The  Origin 
of  Genet's  Projected  Attack  on  Louisiana  and  the  Floridas  (American 
Historical  Review,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  650);  The  Policy  of  France  towards  the 
Mississippi  Valley  in  the  Period  of  Washington  and  Adams  (ibid.  Vol.  X, 
p.  249);  The  Diplomatic  Contest  for  the  Mississippi  Valley  (Atlantic 
Monthly,  Vol.  XCIII,  pp.  676,  807) ;  H.  E.  BOURNE,  The  Correspondence 
of  George  Rogers  Clark  and  Genet,  1793-1794  (American  Historical  Asso- 
ciation Report,  1896),  p.  930. 


x  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

CHAPTER  V 
THE  JEFFERSONIAN  POLICIES 

Henry  Adams's  History  of  the  United  States  of  America  during  the 
Administrations  of  Jefferson  and  Madison  (9  vols.)  (Charles  Scribner's 
Sons)  is  the  standard  work  on  this  period.  Although  Adams  has  a  poor 
opinion  of  Jefferson  and  a  still  poorer  x)ne  of  Madison,  his  work  is  very 
valuable  on  account  of  the  mass  of  material  which  he  has  incorporated 
in  it  from  the  manuscript  collections  in  foreign  archives.  A  more  sym- 
pathetic presentation  of  Jefferson  is  given  by  Edward  Charming,  in  his 
History  of  the  United  States  (The  Macmillan  Company),  Vol.  IV,  chaps. 
x-xx,  and  The  Jeffersonian  System  (Harper  &  Brothers).  Briefer  but 
excellent  treatments  of  Jefferson  are  to  be  found  in  Allen  Johnson's  Jef- 
ferson and  his  Colleagues  (Yale  University  Press)  and  Union  and  Democ- 
racy (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  chaps,  vii-xii.  The  foreign  policy  of 
Jefferson  and  Madison  is  analyzed  with  fine  judgment  in  A.  T.  Mahan's 
Sea  Power  in  its  Relation  to  the  War  of  1812  (2  vols.)  (Little,  Brown  and 
Company).  Besides  Adams  and  Mahan,  the  following  works  may  be 
consulted  for  the  War  of  1812  :  K.  C.  Babcock's  Rise  of  American 
Nationality  (Harper  &  Brothers),  chaps,  iv-x;  Theodore  Roosevelt's  Naval 
War  of  1812  (2  vols.)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons)  ;  and  E.  S.  Maclay's  His- 
tory of  the  United  States  Navy  (3  vols.)  (D.  Appleton  and  Company), 
Vols.  I,  II  (Part  III,  chaps,  i-xvi).  A  wealth  of  material  on  social  and 
economic  conditions  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  will  be 
found  in  the  first  six  chapters  of  Henry  Adams's  work,  in  Timothy 
D  wight's  Travels  in  New  England  and  New  York  (4  vols.)  (New  Haven), 
and  in  McMaster's  History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States  (D.  Apple- 
ton  and  Company),  chaps,  xii-xxix.  The  Writings  of  Thomas  Jefferson 
(10  vols.,  ed.  P.  L.  Ford)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons),  The  Writings  of  Albert 
Gallatin  (3  vols.,  ed.  Henry  Adams)  (J.  B.  Lippincott  Company),  The 
Writings  of  James  Madison  (9  vols.,  ed.  Gaillard  Hunt)  (G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sort's),  and  The  Writings  of  James  Monroe  (7  vols.,  ed.  S.  M.  Hamilton) 
(G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons)  furnish  an  abundance  of  letters  on  the  period.  The 
Jeffersonian  Cyclopadia  (ed.  J.  P.  Foley)  (Funk  &  Wagnalls  Company) 
is  a  huge  volume  containing  extracts  from  Jefferson's  writings,  illustrat- 
ing some  nine  thousand  topics  arranged  alphabetically.  Selected  source 
material  will  be  found  in  Hart's  Contemporaries,  Vol.  Ill,  Nos.  106-129; 
Johnson's  Readings,  Nos.  50,  57,  71,  72,  74,  77,  81-86;  and  G.  S.  Callen- 
der's  Selections  from  the  Economic  History  of  the  United  States,  1765- 
1860  (Ginn  and  Company),  pp.  239-260. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  The  Florida  Boundary  Dispute :    H.  B.  FULLER,  The  Purchase  of 
Florida,  chaps,  iii-vi;   F.  E.   CHADWICK,   The  Relations  of  the   United 
States  and  Spain,  Vol.  I,  pp.  42-116;  I.  J.  Cox,  The  American  Intervention 
in  West  Florida  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  XVII,  pp.  290-311); 
CHARLES  GAYARRE,  History  of  Louisiana,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  211-243;  E.  S. 
BROWN,  The  Constitutional  History  of  the  Louisiana  Purchase,  pp.  170- 
187;  HENRY  ADAMS,  History  of  the  United  States,  Vol.  II,  chap.  v. 

2.  The  Conspiracy  of  Aaron  Burr:    E.  P.  POWELL,  Nullification  and 
Secession  in  the  United  States,  chap,  iv;  F.  T.  HILL,  Decisive  Battles  of 
the  Law,  chap,  ii;   EDWARD  CHANNING,  History  of  the  United  States, 
Vol.  IV,  pp.  336-344;   W.  F.   McCALEB,   The  Aaron  Burr  Conspiracy, 
Writings  of  Thomas  Jefferson  (ed.  Ford),  Vol.  VIII,  pp.  481-504,  and 
Vol.  IX,  pp.  1-67,  141-144 ;  HENRY  ADAMS,  History  of  the  United  States, 
Vol.  Ill,  chaps,  x-xiv,  xix ;  JAMES  PARTON,  The  Life  and  Times  of  Aaron 
Burr,  chaps,  xviii-xxvi;  J.  S.  BASSETT,  The  Life  of  Andrew  Jackson,  Vol.  I, 
chap.  iv. 

3.  The  Struggle  for  Neutral  Trade :  RALPH  D.  PAINE,  The  Fight  for 
a  Free  Sea  (Chronicles  of  America,  Vol.  XVII) ;  Writings  of  James  Madi- 
son (ed.  Hunt),  Vol.  VII,  pp.  204  ff. ;  Writings  of  Thomas  Jefferson  (ed. 
Ford),  Vol.  VI,  pp.  470-484;  A.  T.  MAHAN,  Sea  Power  in  its  Relation  to 
the  War  of  1812,  Vol.  I,  pp.  114-127;  CHANNING,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  352-378 
(with  excellent  summary  of  Orders  and  Decrees) ;  CLIVE  DAY,  A  History 
of  Commerce,  chap,  xlvii;  E.  L.  BOGART,  Economic  History  of  the  United 
States,  chap,  ix;  JAMES  STEPHEN,  War  in  Disguise,  or  the  Frauds  of 
Neutral  Flags. 

4.  The  Hartford  Convention:    Letter  in  American  Historical  Review, 
Vol.  IX,  pp.  96-104;  ALLEN  JOHNSON,  Readings  in  American  Constitu- 
tional History,  Nos.  81-85  ;  HENRY  ADAMS,  Documents  Relating  to  New 
England   Federalism ;    HENRY   ADAMS,   History    of   the    United   States, 
Vol.  VIII,  pp.  287-310;  E.  P.  POWELL,  Nullification  and  Secession  in  the 
United  States,  chap,  v ;  H.  V.  AMES,  State  Documents  on  Federal  Rela- 
tions, No.  2,  p.  10 ;  S.  E.  MORISON,  The  Life  and  Letters  of  Harrison 
Grey  Otis,  Vol.  II,  pp.  78-199.  For  the  text  of  the  report  of  the  Conven- 
tion see  MACDONALD,  Documentary  Source  Book  of  American  History, 
No.  70,  pp.  293-302. 


xii  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

CHAPTER  VI 
THE  NEW  NATIONALISM 

The  first  nine  chapters  of  the  fifth  volume  of  Edward  Channing's 
History  of  the  United  States  (The  Macmillan  Company)  are  devoted 
to  a  survey  of  social  and  industrial  conditions  in  the  three  decades  fol- 
lowing the  War  of  1812.  The  student  may  well  compare  this  survey  with 
the  work  of  similar  purpose  for  the  opening  of  the  nineteenth  century  in 
the  first  six  chapters  of  Henry  Adams's  History  of  the  United  States  of 
America  during  the  Administrations  of  Jefferson  and  Madison.  In  chap- 
ters x  and  xi  Channing  treats  the  political  history  of  the  administrations 
of  Monroe  and  John  Quincy  Adams.  K.  C.  Babcock's  Rise  of  American 
Nationality  (Harper  &  Brothers),  chaps,  xi-xviii,  and  F.  J.  Turner's 
Rise  of  the  New  West  (Harper  &  Brothers)  cover  the  period  of  the 
present  chapter  and  are  provided  with  excellent  bibliographies.  More 
detailed  are  the  accounts  in  J.  B.  McMaster's  History  of  the  People  of  the 
United  States  (D.  Appleton  and  Company),  Vols.  IV,  V  (chaps,  xxiii- 
liii),  and  James  Schouler's  History  of  the  United  States  (Dodd,  Mead  & 
Company),  Vol.  III.  J.  W.  Burgess's  Middle  Period  (Charles  Scribner's 
Sons),  chaps,  i-viii,  is  a  strictly  political  narrative  of  the  years  1816-1830. 
For  the  economic  topics  of  the  chapter  see  D.  R.  Dewey's  Financial  His- 
tory of  the  United  States  (Longmans,  Green  &  Co.);  F.  W.  Taussig's 
Tariff  History  of  the  United  States  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons)  ;  J.  L.  Bishop's 
History  of  American  Manufactures  (Philadelphia),  Vol.  II;  and  R.  C.  H. 
Catterall's  Second  Bank  of  the  United  States  (University  of  Chicago  Press). 
F.  J.  Turner's  collected  articles  entitled  The  Frontier  in  American  His- 
tory (Henry  Holt  and  Company)  are  invaluable  for  the  westward  move- 
ment, to  which  may  be  added  as  interesting  contemporary  accounts 
Timothy  Flint's  Recollections  of  the  Last  Ten  Years  (Cincinnati)  and 
History  and  Geography  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  (Cincinnati)  and  J.  M. 
Peck's  New  Guide  for  Emigrants  to  the  West  (Boston).  Albert  J.  Bev- 
eridge's  Life  of  John  Marshall  (Houghtxm  Mifflin  Company),  Vol.  IV, 
contains  the  best  discussion  of  the  great  decisions  of  the  Supreme  Court. 
The  diplomatic  events  of  the  period  are  treated  in  F.  E.  Chadwick's  Rela- 
tions of  the  United  States  and  Spain  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons),  Vol.  I ; 
F.  L.  Paxson's  Independence  of  the  South  American  Republics  (Ferris 
and  Leach);  and  J.  H.  Latane's  United  States  and  Latin  America 
(Doubleday,  Page  &  Company),  chaps,  i,  ii,  x.  In  addition  to  the  works 
of  Jefferson,  Madison,  and  Monroe  cited  in  the  preceding  chapter,  the 
student  will  find  the  following  collections  useful  to  consult  by  index :  The 
Works  of  Henry  Clay  (10  vols.,  ed.  Calvin  Colton)  (G.  P.  Putnam's 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xiii 

Sons);  The  Works  of  John  C.  Calhoun  (7  vols.,  ed.  R.  K.  Cralle)  (D. 
Appleton  and  Company) ;  The  Writings  of  John  Quincy  Adams  (7  vols.,  ed. 
W.  C.  Ford)  (The  Macmillan  Company);  and  The  Memoirs  of  John 
Quincy  Adams  (12  vols.,  ed.  C.  F.  Adams)  (J.  B.  Lippincott  Company). 
The  biographies  of  Clay  by  Carl  Schurz,  of  Calhoun  by  H.  von  Hoist,  of 
John  Quincy  Adams  by  J.  T.  Morse,  and  of  John  Randolph  by  Henry 
Adams  are  ajl  to  be  found  in  the  American  Statesmen  Series  (Houghton 
Mifflin  Company).  For  selected  source  material  see  MacDonald's  Documen- 
tary Source  Book,  Nos.  71-80 ;  Hart's  Contemporaries,  Vol.  Ill,  Part  VII, 
Nos.  130-150 ;  and  Bogart  and  Thompson's  Readings  in  the  Economic  His- 
tory of  the  United  States  (Longmans,  Green  &  Co.),  chaps,  ix-xvii. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  Westward  Migration  and  Travel:  TILLY  BUTTRICK,  JR.,  Voyages, 
Travels,  and  Discoveries  (1812-1819),  in  R.  G.  THWAITES  (Ed.),  Early 
Western  Travels,  Vol.  VIII,  pp.  21-89;  MORRIS  BIRKBECK,  Notes  on  a 
Journey  in  America  from  the  Coast  of  Virginia  to  the  Territory  of  Illinois 
(1817) ;  H.  B.  FEARON,  Sketches  of  America:  a  Narrative  of  a  Journey  of 
Five  Thousand  Miles  through  the  Eastern  and  Western  States  of  America 
(1817-1818)  ;  JOHN  WOODS,  Two  Years'  Residence  in  the  Settlement  on 
the  English  Prairie  in  the  Illinois  Country  (1820-1822);  JAMES  FLINT, 
Letters  from  America  (1822);  TIMOTHY  FLINT,  Recollections  of  the  Last 
Ten  Years   (1826);   JAMES  HALL,  Letters  from   the  West;  containing 
Sketches  of  Scenery,  Manners,  and  Customs  (1828);  J.  B.  MCMASTER, 
History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States,  Vol.  V,  chap,  xlviii. 

2.  Internal  Improvements  :    The  Writings  of  James  Monroe  (ed.  Hamil- 
ton), Vol.  VI,  pp.  216-284;  DAVID  HOSACK,  Memoirs  of  DeWitt  Clinton, 
Appendix;  ST.  G.  L.  SIOUSSAT,  Memphis  as  a  Gateway  to  the  West  (Ten- 
nessee Historical  Magazine,  March,  1917);  S.  A.  MITCHELL,  Compendium 
of  the  Internal  Improvements  of  the  United  States ;  G.  S.  CALLENDER,  Early 
Transportation  and  Banking  Enterprises  of  the  States  in  Relation  to  the 
Growth  of  Corporations  (Quarterly  Journal  of  Economics,  Vol.  XVII, 
PP-  3-54);  H.  G.  WHEELER,  History  of  Congress,  Vol.  II,  pp.  100-513; 
JOHN  QUINCY  ADAMS,  Memoirs,  Vols.  VI,  VII;  BOGART  and  THOMPSON, 
Readings,  chap.  xii. 

3.  The  Monroe  Doctrine :  Text  in  MACDONALD,  Documentary  Source 
Book,  No.  80;   J.  H.  LATANE,  The  United  States  and  Latin  America, 
chaps,  ii,  x ;  A.  C.  COOLIDGE,  The  United  States  as  a  World  Power,  chap,  v  ; 
H.  V.  W.  TEMPERLEY,  The  Latin-American  Policy  of  Canning  (American 
Historical  Review,  Vol.  XI,  pp.  779  ff.)  ;  W.  C.  FORD,  John  Quincy  Adams 
and  the  Monroe  Doctrine  (American  Historical  Review,Vol.  VII,  pp.  676ff., 


xiv  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

and  Vol.  VIII,  pp.  28  ff.)  and  The  Genesis  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine  (Massa- 
chusetts Historical  Society,  Proceedings,  Series  II,  Vol.  XV,  pp.  373  ff.)  ; 
A.  B.  HART,  The  Monroe  Doctrine,  an  Interpretation-,  A.  B.  HART,  The 
Foundations  of  American  Foreign  Policy,  chap,  vii ;  The  Writings  of  James 
Monroe  (ed.  Hamilton),  Vol.  VI,  pp.  343  ff. ;  JOHN  QUINCY  ADAMS, 
Memoirs,  Vol.  VI,  passim;  F.  E.  CHADWICK,  The  Relations  of  the  United 
States  and  Spain,  Vol.  I,  chaps,  viii-x;  W.  F.  REDDAWAY,  The  Monroe 
Doctrine. 

4.  The  Tariff  of  Abominations:  American  State  Papers,  Finance, 
Vol.  V,  passim ;  F.  W.  TAUSSIG,  State  Papers  and  Speeches  on  the  Tariff, 
pp.  108-213,  and  The  Tariff  History  of  the  United  States,  pp.  37-45, 
68-108 ;  D.  F.  HOUSTON,  Nullification  in  South  Carolina ;  EDWARD  STAN- 
WOOD,  American  Tariff  Controversies  in  the  ipth  Century,  Vol.  I,  chap, 
viii;  The  Works  of  J.  C.  Calhoun  (ed.  Cralle),  Vol.  VI,  pp.  1-59;  BOGART 
and  THOMPSON,  Readings,  chap,  x,  Nos.  4-6. 


CHAPTER  VII 
"THE  REIGN  OF  ANDREW  JACKSON" 

A  very  satisfactory  account  of  the  Jacksonian  era,  especially  on  the 
personal  and  political  side,  is  J.  S.  Bassett's  Andrew  Jackson  (2  vols.) 
(The  Macmillan  Company).  It  may  be  supplemented  on  the  financial  side 
by  W.  G.  Sumner's  Andrew  Jackson  as  a  Public  Man  (American  States- 
man Series)  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  Edward  Stanwood's  Tariff 
Controversies  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company), 
and  D.  R.  Dewey's  Financial  History  of  the  United  States  (Longmans, 
Green  &  Co.).  R.  C.  H.  Catterall's  Second  Bank  of  the  United  States  (Uni- 
versity of  Chicago  Press)  ;  C.  R.  Fish's  Civil  Service  and  the  Patronage 
(Harvard  Historical  Studies,  Vol.  XI) ;  Commons  and  Sumner's  Documen- 
tary History  of  American  Industrial  Society  (10  vols.)  (A.  H.  Clark  and 
Co.)  ;  D.  F.  Houston's  Critical  Study  of  Nullification  in  South  Carolina 
(Harvard  Historical  Studies,  Vol.  Ill),  with  Letters  on  the  Nullification 
Movement  in  South  Carolina  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  VI.  pp. 
736-765,  and  Vol.  VII,  pp.  92-119)  ;  R.  T.  Ely's  Labor  Movement  in 
America  (Thomas  Y.  Crowell  Company)  ;  E.  R.  Johnson's  American  Rail- 
way Transportation  (D.  Appleton  and  Company);  and  J.  A.  Woodburn's 
Political  Parties  and  Party  Problems  in  the  United  States  (G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons)  are  satisfactory  treatments  of  those  problems  of  the  Jacksonian 
era  which  are  indicated  in  the  titles.  The  period  of  the  chapter  is  treated 
in  the  standard  histories  of  McMaster  (Vol.  VI,  chaps,  liv-lxix),  Schouler 
(Vol.  Ill,  chap,  xii,  and  Vol.  IV,  chaps,  xiv,  xv),  and  Channing  (Vol.  V, 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xv 

chaps,  xii-xiv).  An  excellent  presentation  in  a  single  volume  is  William 
MacDonald's  Jacksonian  Democracy  (Harper  &  Brothers),  with  carefully 
selected  bibliography.  F.  A.  Ogg's  Reign  of  Andrew  Jackson  (Yale  Uni- 
versity Press),  C.  H.  Peck's  Jacksonian  Epoch  (Harper  &  Brothers), 
and  W.  E.  Dodd's  Expansion  and  Conflict  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company), 
chaps,  i-vi,  are  scholarly  and  well  written.  For  comments  on  the  men  and 
measures  of  the  time,  John  Quincy  Adams's  Memoirs  (cited  above)  and 
T.  H.  Benton's  Thirty  Years'  View  (with  material  from  private  papers  of 
Jackson)  (D.  Appleton  and  Company)  are  invaluable.  In  addition  to  the 
works  of  Clay  and  Calhoun  above  mentioned,  the  student  may  use  by 
index  The  Works  of  Daniel  Webster  (18  vols.,  ed.  J.  W.  Mclntyre)  (Little, 
Brown  and  Company)  and  The  Letters  of  Daniel  Webster  (ed.  C.  H.  Van 
Tyne)  (McClure,  Phillips  and  Co.).  M.  Ostrogorski's  Democracy  and  the 
Organization  of  Political  Parties  (The  Macmillan  Company),  Vol.  II, 
Part  IV,  chaps,  i-iii,  is  very  valuable  here.  The  following  biographies  may 
be  added :  J.  B.  McMaster's  Life  of  Daniel  Webster  (The  Century  Co.), 
F.  A.  Ogg's  Daniel  Webster  (George  W.  Jacobs  &  Co.),  E.  M.  Shepard's  Life 
of  Martin  Van  Buren  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  T.  D.  Jervey's  Robert 
Y.  Hayne  and  his  Times  (The  Macmillan  Company),  and  Theodore  Roose- 
velt's Thomas  Hart  Benton  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company).  Alexis  de 
Tocqueville's  Democracy  in  America  (ed.  D.  C.  Oilman)  (The  Century 
Co.)  is  one  of  the  most  penetrating  criticisms  of  our  social  and  political 
life  ever  written  by  a  foreign  visitor.  In  lighter  vein  are  Frances  E. 
Trollope's  Domestic  Manners  of  the  Americans  (H.  B.  Bell),  Frances  B. 
Kemble's  Journal  of  a  Residence  on  a  Georgia  Plantation,  1838-1839 
(Harper  &  Brothers),  and  Harriet  Martineau's  Society  in  America  (New 
York).  Jackson's  public  papers  will  be  found  in  J.  D.  Richardson's 
Messages  and  Papers  of  the  Presidents  (10  vols.)  (Washington),  Vol.  II. 
Selected  source  material  for  the  period  is  presented  in  Hart's  Contempo- 
raries, Vol.  Ill,  Nos.  158-186;  MacDonald's  Documentary  Source  Book, 
Nos.  82-95 ;  and  Bogart  and  Thompson's  Readings,  chaps,  x-xvii. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

i.  The  Economic  Basis  of  Nullification :  C.  S.  BOUCHER,  The  Ante- 
Bellum  Attitude  of  the  South  towards  Manufactures  and  Agriculture 
(Washington  University  Studies,  Vol.  Ill,  Part  II,  No.»  2);  U.  B.  PHILLIPS, 
The  Economic  Cost  of  Slave-Holding  in  the  Cotton  Belt  (Political  Science 
Quarterly,  Vol.  XX,  pp.  257-275),  and  Plantation  and  Frontier  (Docu- 
mentary History  of  American  Industrial  Society,  Vols.  I,  II) ;  The  Letters 
of  Dr.  Cooper  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  VI,  pp.  725  ff.)  ;  G.  S. 
CALLENDER  (Ed.),  Selected  Readings  in  the  Economic  History  of  the 


xvi  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

United  States,  pp.  514-536,  539~542 5  M.  B-  HAMMOND,  The  Cotton  In- 
dustry (American  Economic  Association,  Publications,  1897);  J.  B.  Mc- 
MASTER,  Vol.  V,  pp.  1 70  ff. 

2.  The  War  on  the  Bank :    SCHOULER,  Vol.  IV,  chap,  xiii,  sect.  3  ;  J.  Q. 
ADAMS,  Memoirs,  Vol.  VIII;  The  Works  of  Daniel  Webster,  Vol.  Ill, 
pp.  391-447;  C.  COLTON,  Life  and  Times  of  Henry  Clay,  Vol.  II,  chaps. 
iii,  iv;  CLAYTON,  Report  on  the  Condition  of  the  Bank  (House  Reports, 
22  Cong.,  ist  Sess.,  No.  460) ;  R.  C.  McGRANE,  The  Correspondence  of 
Nicholas  Biddle ;  CARL  SCHURZ,  Henry  Clay,  Vol.  I,  chap,  xiii ;  SAMUEL 
TYLER,  Roger  B.  Taney,  Vol.  I,  chap,  iii;  T.  H.  BENTON,  Thirty  Years' 
View,  Vol.  I.  chaps,  xl,  xli,  xlvi-xlviii. 

3.  The  Early  Railroads :     E.  R.  JOHNSON,  American  Railway  Trans- 
portation, chap,  ii;  C.  F.  ADAMS,  JR.,  Railroads,  their  Origin  and  Problems, 
chaps,  i,  ii;  G.  S.  CALLENDER  (Ed),  Selected  Readings  in  the  Economic 
History  of  the  United  States,  pp.  345-348,  404-431 ;  A.  T.  HADLEY,  Rail- 
way Transportation,  its  History  and  Laws,  chap,  ii;  W.  H.  BROWN,  His- 
tory of  the  First  Locomotives  in  America',  FRANCES  B.  KEMBLE,  Journal 
of  a  Residence  on  a  Georgia  Plantation,  pp.  161-172;  U.  B.  PHILLIPS, 
History  of  Transportation  in  the  Eastern  Cotton  Belt,  chap,  iii;  MEYER  and 
MACGILL,  History  of  Transportation  in  the  United  States,  pp.  422-427. 

4.  Labor  Conditions  in  the  Jacksonian  Era :    MICHEL  CHEVALIER,  So- 
ciety, Manners  and  Politics  in  the  United  States,  pp.  135-144,  341-344; 
COMMONS  and  SUMNER,  Documentary  History  of  American  Industrial 
Society,  Vol.  V,  pp.  33!.,  and  Vol.  VI,  pp.  87f.;  HARRIET  MARTINEAU, 
Society  in  America,  Vol.  II,  pp.  53-60 ;  R.  T.  ELY,  The  Labor  Movement 
in  America,  pp.  7-60;  F.  T.  CARLTON,  The  Workingmen's  Party  of  New 
York  City,  1829-1831  (Political  Science  Quarterly,  Vol.  XXII,  pp.  401  f.) ; 
J.  R.  COMMONS,  Labor  Organizations  and  Labor  Politics  (Quarterly  Journal 
of  Economics,  Vol.  XXI,  pp.  323!.);  G.  S.  CALLENDER  (Ed.),  Selected 
Readings,  pp.  459-471;  EDWARD  CHANNING,  History  of  the  United  States, 
Vol.  V,  chap,  iv  (with  references  in  footnotes) ;  S.  P.  ORTH,  The  Armies 
of  Labor,  chap.  ii. 

5.  The  Rise  of  the  Whig  Party :    J.  A.  WOODBURN,  Political  Parties 
and  Party  Problems  in  the  United  States,  chap,  iv ;  EDWARD  STANWOOD, 
History  of  the  Presidency,  Vol.  I,  chaps,  xv,  xvi;  S.  P.  ORTH,  The  Boss  and 
the  Machine,  chaps,  i,  ii ;  MCMASTER,  Vol.  VI,  chap.  Ixix ;  JOSIAH  QUINCY, 
John  Quincy  Adams,  chaps,  viii,  ix ;  A.  D.  MORSE,  The  Political  Influence  of 
Andrew  Jackson  (Political  Science  Quarterly,  Vol.  I,  pp.  153!!);  C.  H. 
VAN  TYNE,  The  Letters  of  Daniel  Webster,  pp.  141-205 ;  H.  J.  FORD,  Rise 
and  Growth  of  American  Politics,  chaps,  xiii-xv ;  A.  C.  COLE,  The  Whig 
Party  in  the  South,  chaps,  i,  ii ;  MARTIN  VAN  BUREN,  Inquiry  into  Political 
Parties,  chap,  vii ;  C.  A.  DAVIS,  Letters  of  Major  Jack  Downing. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xvii 

CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  ADVANCE  TO  THE  PACIFIC 

The  concluding  chapters  (xv-xviii)  of  Edward  Channing's  History  of 
the  United  States  (The  Macmillan  Company),  treating  of  Western  set- 
tlements in  the  decade  1840-1850,  California,  Oregon,  Texas,  and  the 
Mexican  War,  are  the  best  general  presentation  of  the  history  covered  by 
the  first  two  sections  of  this  chapter.  For  the  third  section  the  student 
should  turn  to  the  first  volume  of  James  Ford  Rhodes's  great  work  entitled 
The  History  of  the  United  States  since  the  Compromise  of  1850  (The  Mac- 
millan Company),  chaps,  ii,  iii,  iv  (with  a  masterly  summary  of  the  ef- 
fects of  slavery  on  the  South).  G.  P.  Garrison's  Westward  Extension 
(Harper  &  Brothers)  covers  the  decade  1840-1850  and  has  a  careful 
bibliography  for  students  who  can  pursue  the  study  to  original  sources. 
W.  E.  Dodd's  Expansion  and  Conflict  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  chaps, 
vii-ix,  is  a  clear  and  concise  account  of  the  period,  and  N.  W.  Stephenson's 
Texas  and  the  Mexican  War  (Yale  University  Press)  is  a  most  readable 
little  book  prepared  from  excellent  select  sources.  More  extended  accounts 
of  the  period  may  be  found  in  the  standard  histories  of  McMaster,  Vols. 
VII,  VIII  (chaps.  Ixxii-lxxxix),  and  Schouler,  Vols.  IV,  V  (chaps,  xvi- 
xx).  J.  W.  Burgess's  Middle  Period  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons),  chaps, 
xiii-xvii,  emphasizes  the  legal  and  constitutional  aspects  of  the  period. 
Special  works,  in  greater  detail,  on  the  subjects  treated  in  this  chapter  are 
L.  G.  Tyler's  Letters  and  Times  of  the  Tylers  (3  vols.)  (Richmond)  ; 
W.  P.  and  F.  J.  Garrison's  William  Lloyd  Garrison  (4  vols.)  (The  Cen- 
tury Co.),  Vol.  Ill;  Justin  H.  Smith's  Annexation  of  Texas  (The  Baker 
&  Taylor  Co.),  whose  undue  emphasis  on  British  intrigue  in  Texas 
may  be  corrected  by  E.  D.  Adams's  British  Interests  and  Activities  in 
Texas,  1838-1846  (Johns  Hopkins  Press)  ;  Justin  H.  Smith's  War  with 
Mexico  (2  vols.)  (The  Macmillan  Company),  a  work  of  extraordinary 
fullness  and  accuracy,  very  favorable  to  Polk  and  Scott ;  G.  P.  Garrison's 
Texas,  a  Contest  of  Civilizations  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company)  ;  The 
Diplomatic  Correspondence  of  the  Republic  of  Texas  (3  vols.)  (American 
Historical  Association  Reports,  1907-1909)  ;  Robert  Greenhow's  History 
of  Oregon  and  California  (Little,  Brown  and  Company)  ;  W.  A.  Linn's 
Story  of  the  Mormons  (The  Macmillan  Company) ;  Francis  Parkman's 
Oregon  Trail  (Little,  Brown  and  Company)  ;  H.  H.  Bancroft's  California 
Inter  Pocula  (San  Francisco)  ;  R.  H.  Dana's  Two  Years  before  the  Mast 
(E.  P.  Button  and  Company)  ;  U.  S.  Grant's  Personal  Memoirs  (The 
Century  Co.)  ;  J.  H.  Latane's  Diplomacy  of  the  United  States  in  Regard  to 
Cuba  (American  Historical  Association  Reports,  1897) ;  Ira  D.  Travis,  His- 


xviii  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

tory  of  the  Clayton-Bulwer  Treaty  (Michigan  Political  Science  Association, 
Publications,  1900).  The  in  valuable  Diary  oj  Ja  mesK.Polk  has  been  edited 
in  four  volumes  by  M.  M.  Quaife  (Chicago  Historical  Society).  Much  inter- 
esting material  on  the  period  of  the  chapter  will  be  found  in  John  Quincy 
Adams's  Memoirs,  Vols.  X-XII.  J.  C.  Fremont's  Report  of  an  Explor- 
ing Expedition  to  Oregon  and  Northern  California  (New  York)  is  a  lively 
narrative.  The  Pro-Slavery  Argument  (J.  B.  Lippincott  Company)  con- 
tains apologies  for  the  slave  system  by  Chancellor  Harper  and  Gover- 
nor Hammond  of  South  Carolina,  William  Gilmore  Simms,  and  Professor 
Dew  of  William  and  Mary  College.  The  four  great  speeches  on  the  Com- 
promise of  1850  may  be  found  in  the  works  of  Henry  Clay  (ed.  Colton), 
Vol.  IX,  pp.  529-567 ;  of  Calhoun  (ed.  Cralle),  Vol.  IV,  pp.  542-573 ;  of 
Webster  (ed.  Mclntyre),  Vol.  X,  pp.  57-98;  and  of  Seward  (ed.  Geo.  E. 
Baker)  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  Vol.  I,  pp.  51-93.  James  Russell 
Lowell's  Present  Crisis  and  Biglow  Papers  (First  Series)  are  scathing  in- 
dictments of  the  annexation  of  Texas  and  the  Mexican  War.  Selected 
documents  and  sources  on  the  period  may  be  found  in  G.  S.  Calender's 
Selected  Readings,  pp.  597-665 ;  Hart's  Contemporaries,  Vol.  Ill,  Nos. 
185-189,  and  Vol.  IV,  pp.  7-22 ;  and  William  MacDonald's  Documentary 
Source  Book,  Nos.  96-107. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  The  Webster-Ashburton  Treaty :    JOHN  BASSETT  MOORE,  Interna- 
tional Arbitrations,  Vol.  I,  chaps,  i-vi;  T.  H.  BENTON,  Abridgment  of  the 
Debates  in  Congress,  Vol.  XIV,  pp.  576  f. ;  Niles'  Register,  Vol.  LXIII, 
pp.  41-47,  53-63  (for  official  correspondence  between  Webster  and  Lord 
Ashburton)  ;  G.  T.  CURTIS,  Daniel  Webster,  Vol.  II,  chaps,  xxviii,  xxix, 
xxxii;  W.  F.  GANONG,  A  Monograph  of  the  Evolution  of  the  Boundaries 
of  New  Brunswick,  pp.  241-361 ;  L.  G.  TYLER,  Life  and  Letters  of  the 
Tylers,  Vol.  II,  pp.  201-243 ;  H.  S.  BURRAGE,  Maine  in  the  Northeastern 
Boundary  Controversy ;   E.  D.  ADAMS,  Lord  Ashburton  and  the  Treaty 
of  Washington  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  XVII,  pp.  746-782)  ; 
JARED  SPARKS,  The  Webster-Ashburton  Treaty  (North  American  Review, 
Vol.  LVI,  pp.  452  ff.). 

2 .  American  Pioneers  in  Texas  :     HENRY  BRUCE,   Life  of  General 
Houston,  pp.  64-156;  L.  A.  WRIGHT,  Life  of  Stephen  F.  Austin  (Austin 
College   Bulletin,   October,    1910) ;    Texas   in    1840,    or   the   Emigrants' 
Guide',  W.  B.  DEWERS,  Letters  from  an  Early  Settler  of  Texas',  L.  G. 
BUGBEE,  Some  Difficulties  of  a  Texas  Empresario   (Southern  Historical 
Association,  Publications,  April,  1899);  D.  G.  WOOTEN,  A  Comprehensive 
History  of  Texas,  Part  II,  chaps,  i-ix;  E.  Z.  FATHER,  De  Witt's  Colony 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xix 

(Texas  State  Historical  Association,  Quarterly,  Vol.  VIII,  pp.  95-102); 
G.  P.  GARRISON,  Texas,  a  Contest  of  Civilizations,  pp.  137-169,  and  The 
First  Stage  of  the  Movement  for  the  Annexation  of  Texas  (American 
History  Review,  Vol.  X,  pp.  72-96). 

3.  The  Gold-Seekers  in  California  :  STUART  EDWARD  WHITE,  The  Forty - 
Niners ;  H.  H.  BANCROFT,  California  Inter  Pocula ;  J.  T.  BROOKS,  Four 
Months  among  the  Gold-Finders  in  California ;  W.  G.  JOHNSTON,  The  Ex- 
perience of  a  Forty-Niner ;  J.  S.  HITTELL,  The  Discovery  of  Gold  in\ 
California  (Century  Magazine,  Vol.  XIX,  pp.  525-536)  ;  JOSIAH  ROYCE, 
California,  pp.  220-246,  278-356;  WALTER  COLTON,  Three  Years  in  Cali- 
fornia, pp.  242-290 ;  BERNARD  MOSES,  The  Establishment  of  Municipal 
Government  in  San  Francisco. 

4.  The  Oregon  Boundary  Settlement :    H.   H.    BANCROFT,   History  of 
Oregon,  Vol.  I,  chap,  xiv;  JAMES  K.  POLK,  Diary  (index  under  "Oregon"); 
TRAVERS  Twiss,  The  Oregon  Question ;  L.  B.  SHIPPEE,  Federal  Relations 
of  Oregon  (in  Oregon  Historical  Society,  Quarterly,  Vol.  XIX,  pp.  89,  189, 
283)  ;    R.   L.   SCHUYLER,   Polk   and   the  Oregon   Compromise    (Political 
Science  Quarterly,  Vol.  XXVI,  pp.  443  ff.) ;  Correspondence  of  J.  C.  Cal- 
houn  (American  Historical  Association  Reports,  1899),  Vol.  II,  pp.  653- 
698,  1065-1083  ;  JOSEPH  SCHAFER,  The  British  Attitude  toward  the  Oregon 
Question  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  XVI,  pp.  273-299);  C.  H.  VAN 
TYNE,  Letters  of  Daniel  Webster,  pp.  215,  227-330,  361 ;  J.  R.  WILSON, 
The  Oregon  Question  (Oregon  Historical  Society,  Quarterly,  Vol.  I,  pp. 
in  ff.). 

5.  Plans  for  an  Isthmian  Canal :   J.  H.  LATANE',  The  Diplomatic  Rela- 
tions of  the  United  States  and  Latin  America,  pp.  176-195  ;  G.  F.  TUCKER, 
The  Monroe  Doctrine,  chaps,  iv-vi;  W.  F.  JOHNSON,  Four  Centuries  of 
the  Panama  Canal,  pp.  51-77;  Senate  Executive  Documents,  47  Cong., 
ist  Sess.  Vol.  VI,  p.  194 ;  L.  M.  KEASBEY,  The  Nicaragua  Canal  and  the 
Monroe  Doctrine]  T.  J.  LAWRENCE,  Disputed  Questions  in  Modern  Inter- 
national Law,  pp.  80-142;  I.  D.  TRAVIS,  The  History  of  the  Clayton- 
Bulwer  Treaty  (Michigan  Political  Science  Association,  Publications,  Vol. 
II,  No.   8);   HENRY  HUBERICH,   The  Trans-Isthmian  Canal,  pp.   6-15; 
J.  B.  MCMASTER,  History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States,  Vol.  VII, 
PP.  552-577. 

CHAPTER  IX 
THE  HOUSE  DIVIDED  AGAINST  ITSELF 

James  Ford  Rhodes's  History  of  the  United  States  of  America  from  the 
Compromise  of  1850  (7  vols.)  (The  Macmillan  Company)  will  be  the 
student's  main  work  t)f  reference  for  this  and  the  following  chapter. 


xx  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

It  is  a  work  of  the  highest  authority,  accurate  in  statement,  fair  in  judg- 
ment, and  dignified  in  style.  The  period  from  the  inauguration  of  Pierce 
to  the  fall  of  Fort  Sumter  is  treated  in  Vol.  I,  chap,  v,  to  Vol.  Ill,  chap, 
xiv.  Rhodes  may  be  supplemented  on  the  legal  side  by  J.  W.  Burgess's 
Middle  Period,  chaps,  xviii-xxii,  and  The  Civil  War  and  the  Constitution, 
Vol.  I,  chaps,  i-vi  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons).  J.  B.  McMaster's  valuable 
History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States  (D.  Appleton  and  Company), 
with  its  exploitation  of  a  wide  range  of  popular  sources,  comes  to  an 
end  with  Buchanan's  administration.  Vol.  VIII,  chaps,  xc-xcvii,  of  Mc- 
Master,  and  Vol.  V,  chaps,  xxi  and  xxii,  of  Schouler,  treat  the  period  of  the 
present  chapter.  Two  volumes  of  the  American  Nation  Series  (Harper  & 
Brothers) — T.  C.  Smith's  Parties  and  Slavery  and  F.  E.  Chadwick's  Causes 
of  the  Civil  War — cover  the  decade  i85o-i86o  very  satisfactorily  and  are 
provided  with  exhaustive  bibliographies.  The  following  volumes  of  the 
Chronicles  of  America  (Yale  University  Press)  contain  interesting  material 
on  the  period :  Emerson  Hough's  Passing  of  the  Frontier,  W.  E.  Dodd's 
Cotton  Kingdom,  Jesse  Macy's  Anti-Slavery  Crusade,  N.  W.  Stephenson's 
Abraham  Lincoln  and  the  Union,  and  John  Moody 's  Railroad  Builders. 
The  Works  of  Abraham  Lincoln  (2  vols.,  ed.  Nicolay  and  Hay)  (The 
Century  Co.),  The  Works  of  James  Buchanan  (12  vols.,  ed.  J.  B.  Moore) 
(J.  B.  Lippincott  Company),  and  The  Works  of  Charles  Sumner  (15 
vols.)  (Lothrop,  Lee  &  Shepard  Company)  may  be  consulted  by  index. 
Nicolay  and  Hay's  monumental  Life  of  Abraham  Lincoln  (10  vols.) 
(The  Century  Co.)  is  indispensable  for  a  thorough  study  of  the  great 
liberator.  Of  the  scores  of  biographies  of  Lincoln  in  single  volumes, 
perhaps  that  of  Lord  Charnwood  (Constable  &  Company,  London)  is 
the  best.  Of  the  numerous  biographies  of  other  statesmen  and  lead- 
ing figures  of  the  period,  the  following  may  be  recommended :  Stephen 
A.  Douglas,  by  Allen  Johnson  (The  Macmillan  Company)  and  by  Louis 
Howland  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons) ;  Jefferson  Davis,  by  Armitage  Gordon 
(Charles  Scribner's  Sons)  and  by  W.  E.  Dodd  (George  W.  Jacobs  &  Co.); 
Alexander  H.  Stephens,  by  Louis  B.  Pendleton  (George  W.  Jacobs  &  Co.) ; 
W.  H.  Seward,  by  Frederick  W.  Seward  (Derby  and  Co.),  Vol.  II ;  James 
Buchanan,  by  G.  T.  Curtis  (Harper  &  Brothers)  ;  S.  P.  Chase,  by  A.  B. 
Hart  (Houghton  MifBin  Company)  ;  John  Brown,  by  O.  G.  Villard 
(Houghton  Miffiin  Company)  ;  /.  /.  Crittenden,  by  Mrs.  M.  Coleman 
(J.  B.  Lippincott  Company).  Buchanan's  own  apology  for  his  position  is  in 
Mr.  Buchanan's  Administration  on  the  Eve  of  the  Rebellion  (D.  Appleton 
and  Company).  Special  works  on  important  topics  of  the  period  are  P.  0. 
Ray's  Repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  (Cleveland)  and  The  Genesis 
of  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act  (American  Historical  Association  Reports, 
1914,  pp.  259-280) ;  G.  H.  Putnam's  (Ed.)  Political  Debates  between 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xxi 

Abraham  Lincoln  and  Stephen  A.  Douglas  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons)  ; 
Charles  Robinson's  Kansas  Conflict  (Harper  &  Brothers)  ;  Francis  Curtis's 
Republican  Party  (2  vols.)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons) ;  E.  S.  Corwin's 
Dred  Scott  Decision  in  the  Light  of  Contemporary  Legal  Doctrine  (Amer- 
ican Historical  Review,  Vol.  XVII,  pp.  52-69)  ;  E.  D.  Fite's  Presidential 
Campaign  of  1860  (The  Macmillan  Company)  ;  E.  P.  Powell's  Nullifica- 
tion and  Secession  in  the  United  States  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons),  chaps, 
vii,  viii ;  J.  B.  Sanborn's  Congressional  Grants  of  Land  in  Aid  of  Railways 
(University  of  Wisconsin,  Bulletin  No.  jo);  F.  L.  Olmsted's  Journey  in 
the  Seaboard  Slave  States  .  .  .  1853-1854  (2  vols.)  (G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons).  Neither  Jefferson  Davis's  Rise  and  Fall  of  the  Confederate  Govern- 
ment (2  vols.)  (D.  Appleton  and  Company)  nor  Alexander  H.  Stephens 's 
Constitutional  View  of  the  War  between  the  States  (2  vols.)  (The  Na- 
tional Publishing  Co.)  gives  an  adequate  treatment  of  the  important 
decade  preceding  the  outbreak  of  the  war.  Invaluable  material  on  the 
state  of  the  country  in  1850  can  be  found  in  the  Eighth  Census  of  the 
United  States  (4  vols.)  (Washington),  and  an  intimate  view  of  the 
opinions  of  leaders  in  the  South  can  be  gathered  from  the  voluminous 
Correspondence  of  Robert  Toombs,  Alexander  H.  Stephens,  and  Howell 
Cobb  (2  vols.,  ed.  U.  B.  Phillips)  (American  Historical  Association 
Reports,  1911).  The  text  of  the  Dred  Scott  decision  is  contained  in  U.  5. 
Reports,  19  How.  393-633,  and  is  summarized  in  William  MacDonald's 
Documentary  Source  Book,  pp.  406-420.  Other  important  source  material 
is  to  be  found  in  MacDonald,  Nos.  109-115;  Hart's  Contemporaries, 
Vol.  IV,  Nos.  19-69;  Bogart  and  Thompson's  Readings,  chap,  xxii;  and 
G.  S.  Calender's  Readings,  pp.  738-793. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  Bleeding  Kansas  :   J.  D.  RICHARDSON,  Messages  and  Papers  of  the 
Presidents,  Vol.  V,  pp.  352-360,  390,  401-407,  449-454,  471-481 ;   The 
Works  of  James  Buchanan,  Vol.  X,  pp.  105-325,  and  Mr.  Buchanan's 
Administration  on  the  Eve  of  the  Rebellion,  pp.  28-56 ;  HENRY  WILSON, 
The  Rise  and  Pall  of  the  Slave  Power  in  America,  Vol.  II,  chaps,  xxxv- 
xxxvii ;   CHARLES  ROBINSON,  The  Kansas  Conflict,  chaps,  v-xiii ;  JOHN 
GREENLEAF  WHITTIER,  The  Kansas  Emigrants  and  Brown  of  Ossawat- 
omie;  HART,  Contemporaries,  Vol.  IV,  Nos.  36-40;  L.  W.  SPRING,  Kan- 
sas, the  Prelude  to  the  War  for  the  Union,  chaps,  iii-xii,  and  The  Career 
of  a  Kansas  Politician  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  IV,f>p.  80-104); 
W.  L.  FLEMING,  The  Buford  Expedition  to  Kansas  (American  Historical 
Review,  Vol.  VI,  pp.  38-48). 

2.  The  Origin  of  the  Republican  Party  :    EDWARD  STANWOOD,  The  His- 
tory of  the  Presidency,  chaps,  xix,  xx ;  G.  W.  JULIAN,  Personal  Recol- 


xxii  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

lections,  pp.  134-150;  FRANCIS  CURTIS,  The  Republican  Party,  Vol.  I, 
pp.  172-234;  T.  C.  SMITH,  The  Liberty  and  Free  Soil  Parties  in  the 
Northwest  (Harvard  Historical  Studies,  Vol.  VI),  chaps,  xiv-xix;  W.  E. 
DODD,  The  Fight  for  the  Northwest  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol. 
XVI,  pp.  774-788) ;  A.  D.  MORSE,  The  Republican  Party  (Political  Science 
Quarterly,  Vol.  VIJ,  pp.  522-535);  C.  H.  VAN  TYNE,  Letters  of  Daniel 
Webster,  pp.  475-542 ;  D.  S.  ALEXANDER,  The  Political  History  of  New 
York,  Vol.  II,  chaps,  xiii-xvii ;  FREDERIC  BANCROFT,  The  Life  of  William  H. 
Seward,  Vol.  I,  pp.  291-311,  363-397,  410-431 ;  ALLEN  JOHNSON,  Stephen 
A.  Douglas,  pp.  260-280 ;  The  Complete  Works  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  Vol. 
I,  pp.  178-226;  JESSE  MACY,  History  of  Political  Parties  .  .  .  1846-1860, 
chaps,  xi,  xiii,  xv. 

3.  The  Career  of  William  Walker :    H.  H.  BANCROFT,  History  of  the 
Pacific  States,  Vol.  Ill,  chaps,  xvi,  xvii ;  JAMES  J.  ROCHE,  The  Story  of 
the  Filibuster -ers;  WILLIAM  WALKER,  The  War  in  Nicaragua-,  MCMASTER, 
Vol.  VIII,  pp.  189-191,  340-344  (with  references  to  contemporary  news- 
papers) ;  C.  W.  DOUBLEDAY,  Reminiscences  of  the  "Filibuster"  War  in 
Nicaragua',   W.  V.   WELLS,   Walker's  Expedition  to  Nicaragua',    W.  O. 
SCROGGS,  Walker  and  the  Steamship  Company  (American  Historical  Re- 
view, Vol.  X,  pp.  792-811) ;  WILLIAM  WALKER,  General  Walker's  Policy  in 
Central  America  (De  Bow's  Review,  February,  1860). 

4.  The  Nomination  of  Abraham  Lincoln :    G.  W.  JULIAN,  The  First 
Republican  National  Convention  (American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  IV, 
pp.  313-322)  ;  NICOLAY  and  HAY,  Abraham  Lincoln,  Vol.  II,  pp.  255-278 ; 
J.  F.  RHODES,  History  of  the  United  States,  Vol.  II,  pp.  456-473 ;  E.  D. 
FITE,  The  Presidential  Campaign  of  1860,  pp.  117-131;  MCMASTER,  Vol. 
VIII,  pp.  452-457 ;   The  Complete  Works  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  Vol.  I, 
pp.  599,  616;  MURAT  HALSTEAD,  Caucuses  of  1860,  pp.  141-154;  EDWARD 
STANWOOD,  History  of  the  Presidency,  pp.  290-297. 

5.  The  Southern  Argument  for  Secession :    A.  P.  UPSHUR,  The  Na- 
ture of  the  Federal  Government    (The  South  in  the  Building  of  the 
Nation,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  466-486,  499,  500)  ;  JEFFERSON  DAVIS,  The  Rise  and 
Fall  of  the  Confederate  Government,  Vol.  I,  Part  I;   U.  B.  PHILLIPS, 
Georgia  and  States   Rights    (American  Historical   Association   Reports, 
1901)  ;  T.  R.  R.  COBB,  An  Inquiry  into  the  Law  of  Negro  Slavery ;  ALEX- 
ANDER H.  STEPHENS,  The  War  between  the  States,  Vol.  I.  pp.  17-49,  459- 
539 ;  C.  F.  ADAMS,  The  Constitutional  Ethics  of  Secession  (Massachusetts 
Historical  Society,  Proceedings,  Series  II,  Vol.  XVII,  pp.  99  f.)  ;  HART, 
Contemporaries,  Vol.  IV,  NDS.  54,  55 ;  J.  L.  M.  CURRY,  The  Southern 
States  considered  in  their  Relations  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States 
and  to  the  Resulting  Union ;  F.  E.  CHADWICK,  Causes  of  the  Civil  War, 
PP-  37-53  (Calhoun's  doctrines) ;  E.  A.  POLLARD,  The  Lost  Cause,  chap.  i. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xxiii 

CHAPTER  X 
THE  CIVIL  WAR 

The  most  satisfactory  story  of  the  Civil  War,  in  point  of  accuracy,  fair- 
ness, and  sustained  interest,  is  contained  in  the  third,  fourth,  and  fifth 
volumes  of  J.  F.  Rhodes 's  History  of  the  United  States  from  the  Com- 
promise of  1850  (The  Macmillan  Company).  Rhodes's  account  is  criti- 
cized in  some  respects  by  Charles  F.  Adams,  in  a  pamphlet  entitled  Some 
Phases  of  the  Civil  War.  The  single  volume  by  Rhodes  on  the  History  of 
the  Civil  War  (The  Macmillan  Company)  is  not  a  condensation  of  this 
larger  work  but  a  fresh  presentation.  Two  volumes  in  the  American  Na- 
tion Series  by  J.  H.  Hosmer — The  Appeal  to  Arms  and  The  Outcome  of 
the  Civil  War  (Harper  &  Brothers) — cover  the  ground  completely  and 
are  provided  with  excellent  bibliographies.  In  briefer  form  the  period  is 
treated  in  N.  W.  Stephenson's  Abraham  Lincoln  and  the  Union  and  in  the 
Day  of  the  Confederacy,  and  in  W.  Wood's  Captains  of  the  Civil  War 
(Yale  University  Press)  ;  also  in  F.  L.  Paxson's  Civil  War  (Henry  Holt 
and  Company).  For  more  detailed  military  treatments,  with  excellent 
maps,  see  Wood  and  Edmonds's  Civil  War  in  the  United  States  (G.  P. 
Putnam's  Sons)  and  J.  Formsby's  American  Civil  War  (Charles  Scrib- 
ner's  Sons).  Almost  all  the  important  commanders  in  the  war — Grant, 
McClellan,  Sheridan,  Sherman,  Longstreet,  etc.,  with  the  notable  excep- 
tion of  Robert  E.  Lee — left  memoirs.  These  personal  accounts  are  subject 
to  the  temptation  of  "coloring"  which  besets  all  memoirs,  and  the  careful 
student  must  check  them  by  reference  to  the  great  work  of  the  United 
States  government  entitled  Official  Records  of  the  Union  and  Confederate 
Armies  and  Navies  in  over  one  hundred  and  fifty  volumes.  This  work  is 
described  in  Hosmer's  Outcome  of  the  Civil  War,  pp.  314-318.  The  Cam- 
paigns of  the  Civil  War  (13  vols.)  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons)  and  Battles 
and  Leaders  of  the  Civil  War  (4  vols.,  ed.  Johnson  and  Buell)  (The  Cen- 
tury Co.)  are  valuable  studies  of  the  chief  campaigns,  written  for  the  most 
part  by  participants.  A  similar  work  from  Southern  sources  is  C.  A.  Evans's 
Confederate  History  (12  vols.)  (The  Confederate  Publishing  Co.).  To  the 
biographies  of  Lincoln,  Seward,  Davis,  and  Stephens  cited  under  a  former 
chapter  should  be  added  G.  C.  Gorham's  Life  and  Public  Services  of  Edwin 
M.  Stanton  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company),  Vol.  I;  G.  F.  R.  Henderson's 
Stonewall  Jackson  and  the  American  Civil  War  (2  vols.)  (Longmans, 
Green  &  C9-);  H.  A.  White's  Robert  E.  Lee  and  the  Southern  Confed- 
eracy (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons) ;  the  Diary  of  Gideon  Welles  (Houghton 
Mifflin  Company),  chaps,  i-xxx;  A  Cycle  of  Adams  Letters,  1860-1865  (ed. 
W.  C.  Ford)  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company);  and  R.  E.  Lee's  Dispatches, 
,  to  Jeferson  Davis  (ed.  W.  J.  de  Renne)  (G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons). 


xxiv  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 

The  constitutional  aspects  of  the  war  are  well  treated,  from  the  North- 
ern point  of  view,  in  J.  W.  Burgess's  Civil  War  and  the  Constitution 
(2  vols.)  (Charles  Scribner's  Sons)  and  William  Whiting's  War  Powers 
of  the  President  (J.  L.  Shorey,  Boston);  and,  from  the  Southern  point 
of  view,  in  N.  W.  Stephenson's  Day  of  the  Confederacy  (Yale  Univer- 
sity Press)  and  J.  L.  M.  Curry's  Government  of  the  Confederate  States 
(Richmond).  The  diplomatic  history  is  admirably  treated  in  Rhodes's 
History,  to  which  may  be  added  Montague  Bernard's  Historical  Ac- 
count of  the  Neutrality  of  Great  Britain  during  the  American  Civil  War 
(Longmans,  Green  &  Co.),  C.  F.  Adams's  Studies  Military  and  Diplomatic 
(The  Macmillan  Company),  and  J.  M.  Callahan's  Diplomatic  History  of 
the  Southern  Confederacy  (Baltimore).  E.  D.  Fite's  Social  and  Industrial 
Conditions  in  the  North  during  the  Civil  War  (The  Macmillan  Company) 
and  J.  C.  Schwab's  Confederate  States  of  America,  1861-1865  (Yale  Uni- 
versity Press)  are  valuable  studies.  A  useful  list  of  personal  narratives 
illustrating  social  conditions  during  the  war  may  be  found  in  J.  K.  Hosmer's 
Outcome  of  the  Civil  War,  pp.  325-327.  For  naval  operations  see  E.  S. 
Maclay's  History  of  the  United  States  Navy  (3  vols.)  (D.  Appleton  and 
Company)  and  J.  T.  Scharf's  History  of  the  Confederate  States  Navy 
(New  York).  Important  political  documents  of  the  war  period  are  printed 
in  MacDonald's  Documentary  Source  Book,  Nos.  116-142,  and  the  social 
life  of  the  period  is  illustrated  by  extracts  printed  in  Hart's  Contemporaries, 
Vol.  IV,  Nos.  70-140. 

TOPICS  FOR  RESEARCH 

1.  The  Blockade:    A.  ROBERTS  (A.  C.  HOBART),  Never  Caught ;  E.  S. 
MACLAY,  History  of  the  United  States  Navy,  Vol.  II,  pp.  225-281 ;  T.  E. 
TAYLOR,  Running  the  Blockade ;  H.  L.  WAIT,  The  Blockade  of  the  Con- 
federacy (Century  Magazine,  Vol.  XXXIV,  pp.  914-928);  JOHN  WILKIN- 
SON, The  Narrative  of  a  Blockade  Runner  ;  GEORGE  C.  EGGLESTON,  History 
of  the  Confederate  War,  Vol.  I,  pp.  261-267 ;  J-  R-  SOLEY,  The  Blockade 
and  the  Cruisers;  J.  F.  RHODES,  History  of  the  United  States,  Vol.  V, 
pp.  396-420. 

2.  War  Finance  :   T.  E.  BURTON,  John  Sherman  (American  Statesmen, 
Series  II),  pp.  87-141;  JOHN  SHERMAN,  Recollections,  Vol.3I,  chaps,  xii, 
xiii ;  D.  R.  DEWEY,  Financial  History  of  the  United  States,  chaps,  xii, 
xiii;  HUGH  McCuLLOCH,  Men  and  Measures  of  Half  a  Century,  chaps, 
xv-xvii;   E.  P.  OBERHOLTZER,  Jay  Cooke,  Vol.  I,  chaps,  iv-xii;  J.  W. 
SHUCKERS,  The  Life  of  Salmon  P.  Chase,  chaps,  xxx,  xxxvii-xxxix ;  A.  M. 
DAVIS,  Origin  of  the  National  Banking  System ;  WESLEY  C.  MITCHELL, 
History  of  the  Greenbacks ;  J.  C.  SCHWAB,  The  Confederate  States  of 
America;  American  Annual  Cyclopaedia,  pp,   295-314   (1861),  pp.  452- 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  xxv 

474  (1862),  pp.  290-304,  394-412  (1863),  PP-  371-377  (1864),  pp.  335- 
350  (1865). 

3.  The  Trent  Affair  :    J.   F.  RHODES,  History  of  the  United  States, 
Vol.  Ill,  pp.  520-543 ;  E.  L.  PIERCE,  Memoirs  and  Letters  of  Charles  Sum- 
ner,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  50-62;  The  Works  of  Charles  Sumner,  Vol.  VI,  pp.  162- 
168,  219-242  ;  FREDERIC  BANCROFT,  Life  of  Seward,  Vol.  II,  pp.  223-253 ; 
LORD  NEWTON,  Lord  Lyons,  a  Record  of  British  Diplomacy,  Vol.  I,  pp. 
55-62  ;  C.  F.  ADAMS,  The  Trent  Affair  (Massachusetts  Historical  Society, 
Proceedings,  Vol.  XLV,  pp.  148-157);  A  Cycle  of  Adams  Letters,  1861- 
1865  (ed.  W.  C.  Ford),  Vol.  I,  pp.  75,  82,  83,  86,  89,  90,  93,  114. 

4.  Martial  Law  and  Habeas  Corpus  :    L.  G.  TYLER,  The  Suspension  of 
Habeas  Corpus   (Political  Science  Quarterly,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  454);   ALLEN 
JOHNSON,  Readings  in  American  Constitutional  History,  chap,  lii,  Nos. 
155-160;  JOEL  PARKER,  Constitutional  Law  with  Reference  to  the  Present 
Condition  of  the  United  States ;  SAMUEL  TYLER,  Roger  B.  Taney,  chap, 
vi ;    HORACE   BINNEY,   The  Privilege  of  the  Writ  of  Habeas   Corpus ; 
A.  G.  FISHER,   The  Trial  of  the  Constitution;   J.  A.   MARSHALL,   The 
American  Bastille ;  R.  C.  HURD,  A  Treatise  on  Habeas  Corpus ;  EDWARD 
MCPHERSON,  History  of  the  Rebellion,  pp.   153-195;  American  Annual 
Cyclopedia,  pp.  508-515  (1862),  pp.  233-258,  469-491  (1863),  pp.  421- 
425  (1864),  pp.  414-421  (1865). 

5.  Life  in  the  South :     D.  R.  GOODLE,  Resources  and  Industrial  Con- 
dition of  the  Southern  States  (Report  of  the  United  States  Department 
of  Agriculture,  1865),  pp.  no  ff.;  J.  B.  JONES,  A  Rebel  War  Clerk's  Diary  ; 
MARY  A.  H.  GAY,  Life  in  Dixie  during  the  War;  MRS.  ROGER  A.  PRYOR, 
Reminiscences  of  Peace  and  War,  chaps,  ix-xxvi;  DAVID  DODGE,  The  Cave 
Dwellers  of  the  Confederacy   (Atlantic  Monthly,  Vol.  LVIII,  pp.   514- 
521);   J.   K.   HOSMER,   The  Outcome  of  the   Civil  War,  pp.    269-289; 
W.  L.  FLEMING,  Civil  War  and  Reconstruction  in  Alabama,  Parts  I,  II; 
SARAH  L.  JONES,  Life  in  the  South ;  MARY  B.  CHESTNUT,  Diary  from 
Dixie. 


INDEX 


Aberdeen,  Lord,  417 

Abolitionists,  318, 388!,  397f.,  532,  598 

Acts  of  Trade,  42, 6 1 

Adams,  Charles  Francis,  615  n.,  618 

Adams,  Henry,  238,  253  n.,  346n., 
S58n.2,s8in.i 

Adams,  John, and  American  Revolution, 
66,  77n.,  99, 103 ;  on  national  govern- 
ment, io8n.,  109;  minister  to  Great 
Britain,  121, 124, 128;  on  the  Consti- 
tution, 134,  i44n.;  vice  president, 
147,  151;  on  the  "people,"  165;  re- 
lations with  France,  i8of.;  president, 
189!. 

Adams,  John  Quincy,  141  n.,  239;  min- 
ister to  Russia,  253, 275 ;  expansionist, 
298;  relations  with  Spain,  302  f.;  on 
Missouri  Compromise,  3i6f.;  on 
Monroe  Doctrine,  324^;  in  election 
of  1824, 33 if.;  character, 334 ;  policy, 
337 f.;  in  election  of  1828,  345;  on 
tariff,  37°f-;  and  slavery,  378,  390, 
397;  on  Texas,  413  f. 

Adams,  Samuel,  62,  71,  75 

Alabama,  the,  618  and  n. 

Albany  Congress,  49, 109, 113 

"Albany  Regency,"  335 

Alexander  I,  Czar,  275, 322  f. 

Alien  and  Sedition  Acts,  191  f. 

Amendment,  Twelfth,  2oon.;  Thir- 
teenth, 597  f. 

American  Antislavery  Society,  388 

American  Revolution,  55  f . 

"American  System,"  343, 370 

Ames,  Fisher,  152,  i79n.2, 182, 185 

Amherst,  General  Jeffrey,  50 

Amiens,  Peace  of,  215,  232 

Ampudia,  General,  424 

Anabaptists,  3 

Anderson,  Major  Robert,  524^,  541  f., 
548, 620 

Andrew,  Governor  John  A.,  545 

Andros,  Sir  Edmund,  25 f.,  31, 37, 42 

Annapolis  Convention,  136  f. 

Antietam,  battle  of,  571  f. 

Anti-Federalists,  162  f. 


Anti-Masons,  361  and  n. 

Anti-Nebraska  men,  489  f. 

"  Appeal  of  the  Independent  Democrats," 

485 

Appomattox,  surrender  at,  591 
Aranda,  Count,  125 
Armada,  Spanish,  6 
"Armed  neutrality,"  96 
Arnold,  Benedict,  91,  96 
Aroostook  War,  409  f. 
Articles   of    Confederation,   91,    nof., 


Ashburton,  Lord,  41  if.,  422 
"Asiento,"the,3ii 
Assemblies,  colonial,  40,  42,  45 
"Association,"  the  American,  72 
"Assumption,"  155 
Astor,  J.  J.,  305 
Atchison,  D.  R.,488n. 
Atlanta,  capture  of,  588 
Austerlitz,  battle  of,  226,  234 
Austria,  459  f  . 

Bainbridge,  Captain,  264 

Baltimore,  city  of,  545,  547 

Baltimore,  Lord,  12,  18,  22  andn.,  2711. 

Bancroft,  Archbishop,  1  1  n.  i 

Bancroft,  George,  133  n. 

Bank,  National  (first),  i58f. 

Bank,  National  (second),  284  f.,  307  f., 

3S8f.,  362  f.,  382  f.,  4o4f. 
Banks,  state,  285  n.,  607  n. 
Banks,  General  N.  P.,  565  f. 
Barbary  States,  128,  2iof. 
Barbe-Marbois,  215 
Barclay,  Captain,  268 
"  Barnburners,"  441 
Barren,  Captain,  231 
Bates,  Edward,  521,  541  andn.  2 
"  Battle  of  the  Maps,"  41  in. 
Bayard,  Thomas,  275 
Bayonne  Decree,  247 
Bazaine,  Marechal,  619 
Bear  Flag,  428  and  n. 
Beard,  Charles  A.,  i44n.,  163  n.,  i66n.2, 

i99n.,  201  n.  i 


XXV111 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Beauregard,  General  P.  G.  T.,  543,  546, 

552  f.,  56o 

Bedford,  Gunning,  140 
Beecher,  H.  W.,  532 
Beer,  G.  L.,  aon.i 
Bell,  John,  403,  520 
Benjamin,  J.  P.,  574, 602  f. 
Benton,  T.  H.,  304  and  n.,  337 n.,  340, 

3S8f .,  374n.  i,  38Sn.,  438f.,  444, 488n. 
"  Benton's  Mint  Drops,"  386 
Berkeley,  Governor  William,  16,  24 n. 
Berlin  Decree,  235,  238 
Biddle,  Nicholas,  359  f .,  363  f .,  382, 386 
Bienville,  Celeron  de,  47 
"  Biglow  Papers,"  434 
Birney,  James  G.,  419  f. 
Black,  Jeremiah  W.,  524,  527 
Black  Rock,  raid,  263 
Black  Warrior  affair,  464  f. 
"Bladensburg  races,"  272 
Blaine,  James  G.,  492,  595  n. 
Blair,  Francis  P.,  Jr.,  548 
Blair,  James,  151 
Blair,  Montgomery,  501  n.,  541  and  n.  2, 

596f.,6o2 

Blennerhassett,  H.,  229 
Blockade  of  South,  545 f.,  562  f.,  574, 

610 

Board  of  Trade,  44 
Bolivar,  Simon,  339 
Bonaparte,  Napoleon,  183  f.,  213,  226, 

232,   235,   245,   247 f.,   252 f.,   27on., 

276,321! 
Bonus  bill,  297  f. 
Boone,  Daniel,  104, 113 
Booth,  John  Wilkes,  620 
Boscawen,  Admiral,  61 
11  Boston  Massacre,"  68 
"Boston  Tea  Party,"  69 f. 
Bovay,  E.  A.,  491 
Braddock's  defeat,  48 
Bragg,  General  Braxton,  571,  573,  582 f. 
Brandywine  Creek,  battle  of,  91 
Breckinridge,  John,  194 
Breckinridge,  J.  C.,  497,  520 
Brock,  General  Isaac,  262 
Brooklyn  Heights,  battle  of,  84 
Brooks,  Preston  S.,  496 
Brougham,  Lord,  285, 416 
Brown,  General  Jacob,  269 f.,  287 
Brown,  John,  496,  515  f. 
Brown,  Governor  Joseph  E.,  574, 601 
Bryant,W.  C.,  171  n. 
Bryce,  James,  528 
Buchanan,  James,  and  Ostend  Mani- 


festo, 464;  minister  to  England,  467; 

nominated  1856,497  ;  president,  500  f., 

indecision,  524  f.;    change   of  spirit, 

545 

Buckner,  General  Simon  B.,  558 
Buell,  General  Don  Carlos,  557,  573 
Buena  Vista,  battle  of,  431  f. 
Buford,  Major,  495 
Bullock,  James,  617  f. 
Bull  Run,  battle  of  (first)  ,  553  f  . 
Bull  Run,  battle  of  (second)  ,  569  f. 
Bulwer,  Sir  Henry  L.,  46  1  f  . 
Burgess,  J.  W.,  107,  137  n.,  390,  489 
Burgesses,  House  of,  13 
Burgoyne,  General  John,  90  f  . 
Burke,  Edmund,  58  f  .,  64,  67,  81  n. 
Burnside,  General  A.  E.,  572  and  n.  2 
Burr,   Aaron,    198  f.,   222,   224,    228f., 

230f. 

Butler,  A.  P.,  444,  495  f. 
Butler,  General  B.  F.,  554,  561 

Cabinet,  i5of. 

Cable,  Atlantic,  275,  530 

Cabot,  John,  21 

Cadore,  Due  de,  247  f  . 

Calhoun,  John  C.,  as  a  nationalist,  249, 
283  f.  ,  287,  296  f.;  and  Jackson,  301  f., 
354f.;  as  Secretary  of  War,  341;  as 
vice  president,  342,  353;  opposes 
tariff,  345  f.,  353,  369;  on  nullifica- 
tion, 373  ;  on  abolitionists,  389,  398  f.  ; 
relations  with  Texas,  417,  419;  on 
Wilmot  Proviso,  444;  on  Com- 
promise of  1850,  449  f.;  and  Nash- 
ville convention,  454;  on  slavery, 
539 

California,  42  7  f.,  433,  444  f.,  448  f.,  454 

Callender,  G.S.,  131  n.,  i6in. 

Calvinists  of  Rhine,  3 

Cameron,  Simon,  541  n.  2,  547,  556,  602 

Canada,  French,  45  f  .,  54  ;  and  War  of 
1812,  259f.;  in  1837,  396!. 

Canning,  George,  102,  238  f.,  241,  245, 
256,  324,  326 

Canton,  131 

Carlton,  Sir  Guy,  99,  102 

Carmarthen,  Lord,  121,  124 

Caroline  affair,  397,  409  f. 

Cass,  Lewis,  410,  441  f.  446,  458,  503, 


Castlereagh,  Lord,  256,  275,  277 
Cedar  Creek,  battle  of,  588 
Census  of  1850,  467  f. 
Central  America,  462  f  . 


INDEX 


xxix 


Cerro  Gordo,  battle  of,  432 

Champlain,36n. 

Chancellorsville,  battle  of,  575 

Charming,  Edward,  29  n. 3,  4211.1, 
12911.2, 13111.,  186,  217 

Charles  I,  King,  10,  23  f. 

Charles  II,  King,  9,  n,  14,  24f.,  56 

Charleston,  93  f.,  519!,  524!,  543  f.,  620 

Chase,  Salmon  P.,  on  Compromise  of 
1850,  453;  in  convention  of  1860, 
521;  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  534, 
541  and  n.2,  558;  and  war  finance, 
576  and  n.,  584,  605  f. 

Chase,  Samuel,  78, 114,  211,  225 

Chatham,  see  Pitt 

Chattanooga,  574,  582  f. 

Cherbourg,  battle  of,  618 

Cherokees,  340  f. 

Chesapeake  affair,  231  f.,  239,  250 

Chesapeake  defeated,  267 

Chesterfield,  Lord,  49,  51 

Cheves,  Langdon,  249, 329, 490 

Chickamauga,  battle  of,  582 

Chippewa,  battle  of,  270 

Choate,  Rufus,  500 

Choiseul,  54 

Christian  Commission,  611 

Clarendon,  Lord,  25 

Clark,  Daniel,  229 

Clark,  George  Rogers,  ioon.1, 126 

Clark,  William,  221  f. 

Clay,  Henry,  and  War  of  1812,  249, 
252,  260;  at  Ghent,  276;  on  National 
Bank,  284,  358,  363,  385,  4O4f.;  op- 
poses treaty  of  1819  with  Spain,  304 
and  n.;  on  Missouri  Compromise, 
316,  3i8n.;  on  Monroe  Doctrine, 
322 f.;  in  campaign  of  1824,  327, 
330 f.;  Secretary  of  State,  333 f., 
338 f.;  in  campaign  of  1832,  362 f.; 
compromise  of  1833,  373;  on  abo- 
lition, 398 f. ;  and  Harrison,  399, 403 ; 
and  Tyler,  404  f.,  407;  in  campaign 
of  1844,  4i8f.;  and  Compromise  of 
1850,  447  f.,  453,  456;  death,  458 

Clayton,  J.M.,  461  f. 

Clayton  Compromise,  440 

Clayton-Bulwer  Treaty,  462 

Clinton,  DeWitt,  266 

Clinton,  George,  119 

Clinton,  Sir  Henry,  84, 90 f.,  93, 96, 98 

Cobb,  Howell,  316, 447,  503  f.>  527 n. 

Cockburn,  Admiral,  272 

Colbert,  30  n.  i,  45 

Cold  Harbor,  battle  of,  587  and  n. 


Collins,  E.  L.,  478  and  n.  i 
Colombia,  323, 338, 461 
Columbia,  South  Carolina,  590 
Columbia  River,  1 60 n.2,  221 
Commerce,  of  United  States,  160,  173 

and  n.,  174,  232^,  236,  241,  248,  256, 

266f.,  285,29on.i,477f. 
Committees  of  Correspondence,  70  n.,  71 
Committees  of  Safety,  71 
"  Common  Sense,"  81 
Compromise,  Missouri,  309  f. 
Compromise  of  1833, 374f. 
Compromise  of  1850, 443  f.,  466 
Conciliatory  Act,  92 
Concord,  battle  at,  75 
Confederacy,  Southern,  529, 535  and  n., 

6iof. 

Confiscation  Act,  554,  593  f . 
Congress,  First  Continental,  71  f. 
Congress,  Second  Continental,  74  f.,  89, 

107 

Congress  of  Vienna,  277, 322 
Connor,  Commodore,  430 
Conscription  Act,  Southern,  5  74;  North- 
ern, 575  f. 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,  112, 

132 f.,  i38f.,  141  f.,  145 f. 
Constitutional  Union  Party,  520 
Continental  System,  253,  275 
"  Contraband  of  war,"  554n.2 
Contreras,  battle  of,  432 
Cooper,  Peter,  381 
Cooper,  Thomas,  343 
Cooper  Union  speech,  5i8f. 
Copenhagen,  240 
"Copperheads,"  5 75 f. 
Corinth,  560 
Cornwallis,  General,  85, 89.!,  93!.,  96 f., 

98 

"  Corrupt  bargain,"  333 
Corwin,  Thomas,  446 
Cotton,  John,  20  and  n. 
Cotton,  production  and  trade,  287,  295, 

314  and  n.,  472  f.,  551  n.i,  562!.,  609 

and  n.,  610 

"Cotton  is  King,"  473,  5 13 
Coureurs  de  bois,  34 
Cowpens,  battle  of,  96 
Crawford,  W.  H.,  285,  288, 331  f .,  337  n., 

354*. 

Creeks,  2 73, 340  f. 
Creole  affair,  410  f. 
"  Crime  against  Kansas,"  495 
Crimean  War,  465 
Crittenden,  Colonel,  463- 


XXX 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Crittenden,  J.  J.,  404, 406 

Crittenden  Compromise,  525!.,  528,  537 

Cromwell,  Oliver,  13  f.,  23  £.,31 

Cuba,  339, 462  f.,  514 

Cumberland  Road,  257, 321 

Cunard,  Samuel,  477  f . 

Currency,  in  Revolution,  96;  Conti- 
nental, i2of.;  in  Jackson's  day,  386; 
in  Civil  War,  603  f. 

Curtis,  Justice,  502 

Dallas,  Alexander  J.,  285,  29on.2 

Dartmouth,  Lord,  79, 311 

Dartmouth  College  case,  306!. 

Davies,  William,  183, 185 

Davis,  David,  521 

Davis,  Henry  Winter,  599,  619 n.  i 

Davis,  Jefferson,  Secretary  of  War,  467  ; 
on  railroads,  480;  in  Senate,  504; 
resolutions  of  1860,  518;  on  seces- 
sion, 533;  as  president,  535,  545,  553, 
558,  565,  574,  587;  on  Union,  590; 
escape  of,  591;  opposition  to,  6oof. 

Davis- Wade  Bill,  599  f. 

Dearborn,  General  Henry,  206,  257,  263, 
267 

De  Bow,  quoted,  473  n. 3,  476  and  n., 

513,515 
Debt,  colonial,  60  and  n.;  in  1783,  118 

and  n.;  in  1789,  i54f.;  extinguished, 

391;  of  states,  410,  479 f.;  in  Civil 

War,  606 f. 
Debtors'  prisons,  380 
Decatur,  Stephen,  211,  264 
Declaration  of  Independence,  7 if.,  80 

and  n.,  107,  123 
Declaratory  Act,  65 
De  Grasse,  Admiral,  97, 102 
Democracy,  348  f.,  402 
Denonville,  Governor,  37  and  n.  ' 
D'Estaing,  Admiral,  97  n. 
Detroit,   surrendered,   262 ;    recovered, 

268 

Dew,  Thomas,  391  and  n. 
Dickinson,  John,  76,  no,  139 
Dinwiddie,  Governor,  2iri.,  45 
Directory,  French,  179 
Distribution  Act,  392, 395  n. 
Dixo-n,  Archibald,  484 
Dodd,  W.  E.,  quoted,  450, 456  n.,  473  n.  2 
Dodge,  A.  C.,  483 
Donalson,  A.  J.,42of. 
Dongan,  Governor  Thomas,  21  n.,  36f. 
Doniphan,  Colonel,  426f. 
Dorchester,  Lord,  173 


Dorr,  Thomas,  349 n.  2 

Douglas,  Stephen  A.,  483 f.;  on  Kansas, 

498 f.;    and    Buchanan,    504 f.;    and 

Lincoln,  507 f.;  on  slave  trade,  S^f.; 

in    campaign    of    1860,    5i9f.;    on 

South,  522,  545 
Draft  riots,  584, 599  n.  i 
Drake,  Francis,  6 
Dred  Scott  case,  501  f .,  52 1  n. 
Duane,  William,  224, 383 
Du  Barras,  98 
Dunmore,  Governor,  109 
Duquesne,  Fort,  50 
Dutch  on  Hudson,  3,  2 in. 
Dwight,  Timothy,  198,  292 
D'Yrujo,  229 

Early,  General  Jubal,  587  f . 

Eaton,  John,  354n. 

Edict  of  Nantes,  3 

Education, in  colonies,  15 f.;  North  and 
South,  474  f. 

"  Elastic  clause,"  160 

Election,  of  1792,  166,  167 n.i;  of  1796, 
188;  of  1800,  185,  195 f.,  202 f.;  of 
1812,  266;  of  1816,  288;  of  1824, 
330 f.;  of  1828,  345;  of  1832,  365; 
of  1836,  393 ;  of  1840,  401 ;  of  1844, 
4i9f.;  of  1848,  442;  of  1852,  458 f.; 
of  1856,  500;  of  1860,  522 f.;  of  1864, 
588 

Elizabeth,  Queen,  6f.,  lof. 

Ellmaker,  Amos,  361 

Ellsworth,  Oliver,  139, 183 

Emancipation,  compensated,  594 

Emancipation  Proclamation,  572 n.  i, 
595  f- 

Embargo,  of  1794, 174;  of  1808,  240  f. 

Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  489 

Emigrant  Aid  Society,  493 

English  Bill,  506  f. 

"  Enumerated  commodities,"  44  and  n. 

Eppes,  John,  228n. 

"Era  of  good  feelings,"  289f.,  299,  320, 

347 

Ericsson,  John,  563 
Erie  Canal,  329, 337 
Erlanger  loan,  609  f. 
Erskine,  David,  245 
Essex  case,  233 
Eutaw  Springs,  battle  of,  96 
Everett,  Edward,  351, 487,  520 
Ewell,  General,  576 
Ewing,  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  404, 

406 


INDEX 


XXXI 


Excise  of  1791,  209 
"Exposition  and  Protest,"  345 f. 

Fair  Oaks,  battle  of,  565 

Fallen  Timbers,  battle  of,  177 

"Family  Compact,"  17211. 

Faneuil,  Peter,  43 

Farewell  Address,  123, 188 

Farragut,  Admiral  D.  G.,  561, 587 

"Federalist,  The,"  143 

Federalists,  162, 175,  202  f.,  241! 

Ferguson,  Colonel,  94 

Field,  Roswell,  501  n. 

"Fifty-four  forty  or  fight,"  437 

Fillmore,  Millard,  454, 458, 498,  500 

Finances,  Confederate,  555  n.,  604,  608  f. 

Finances,  Northern,  576n.,  584,  603,  f. 

Fisheries,  305  n. 

Fite,  E.D.,  quoted,  6nf. 

Five  Forks,  battle  of,  591 

"  Five-twenties,"  605 

Fletcher  vs.  Peck,  228 

Flint,  Timothy,  299, 309 

Florida,  59,  99,  105,  272,  300 f.,  303 f., 

399,  443  n.,  446 
Florida,  the,  617 
Florida-Blanca,  126 
Floyd,  James,  504, 527 n.i 
Floyd,  John,  371 
Foote,A.H.,355,557f.,s6i 
Forbes,  General,  50 
"Force  Bill,"  of  1833,374!. 
Forney,  J.  W.,  505 
Forster,W.E.,6i8 
Forsythe,  John,  397, 532 
Fort  Donelson,  557 f. 
Fort  Duquesne,  50 
Fort  Henry,  557 
Fort  Jackson,  273 
Fort  Lee,  85 
Fort  McHenry,  272 
Fort  Mimms,  273 
Fort  St.  Marks,  301 
Fort  St.  Philip,  2  73 
Fort  Washington,  85 
"Forty-niners,"  444  f. 
Fouche,  23 in. 
Fox,  C.J.,8in.,  235 
Fox,  G.  V.,  554n. 
France,  aid  from,  83,  92  f.,  97  n.,  166; 

war  with,  in  1798,  i8if. 
Franklin,  Benjamin,  40,  65,  77  and  n., 

86n.,  92,  99,  105,  109,  113,  124,  132, 

139  ^ 
Franklin,  state  of,  127 


Frederick  the  Great,  90 
Fredericksburg, battle  of,  572  n., 573, 575 
Freeman's  Farm,  battle  of,  91 
"Freeport  Doctrine,"  5iof. 
Free-Soilers,  441  f .,  499 
Fremont,  J.  C,  428  f.,  497 f.,  556,  566, 

594 

French  claims,  248 n.,  379 
French  Revolution,  160, 169!.,  183,321  f. 
Frenchtown,  battle  of,  267 
Freneau,  Philip,  164!. 
Fries,  John,  196 
Frontenac,  Count,  36 
Fugitive  Slave  Law,  of  1793,  312;  of 

1850,448,454,457,467 

Gadsden  Purchase,  480 

"  Gag  rule,"  390 

Gage,  Governor,  70,  72,  75 

Gaines,  General,  341 

Gaines's  Mill,  battle  of,  566 

Gallatin,  Albert,  206  f.,  241,  244,  248, 

256f.,266,275f. 
Galloway,  James,  72 
Gardoqui,  126 

Garrison,  William  Lloyd,  380, 388, 620 
Gates,  General  Horatio,  91 
Geary,  J.  W.,  499, 504 
Genet,  Edmond,  i7of.,  175 
George  III,  41,  51,  56f.,  67,  74f.,  80, 

89n.,98, 129,  255f.,  290 
Georgia, 42n.2, 94, 114,  227, 34of. 
Germantown,  3 ;  battle  of,  91 
Gerry,  Elbridge,  180 
Gettysburg,  battle  of,  577 f. 
Ghent,  Treaty  of,  271,  275 
Gibraltar,  99 
Gillespie,  Lieutenant,  428 
Gist,  Christopher,  47 
Gist,  Governor,  522 
Gladstone,  W.  E.,  133 
Godoy,  Don  Manuel,  177 
Gold,  discovery,  444  f.,  471 
"  Gold  pills,"  58 
Granger,  Gideon,  206 
Grant,  Sir  William,  233 
Grant,  General  U.S.,  557 f.,  579f.,  583, 

586f.,59i 

Graves,  Admiral,  98 
Gray,  Captain  Robert,  i6on.2,3os 
Great  Britain,  and  colonies,  20  f.,  55  f., 

103;  and  United  States,  12 if.,  i72f., 

285,  329;  and  Confederacy,  6141. 
Greeley,  Horace,  489, 491,  507,  521,  533, 

598n.2 


XXX11 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Greenbacks,  605  f. 
Grenville,  George,  57 f.,  62  f.,  65 
Greytown,  bombarded,  461 
Grundy,  Felix,  249,  372,  392  n. 
Guadalupe-Hidalgo,  treaty  of,  433 
Guadeloupe,  54 

Habeas  Corpus,  13,  592!.,  598  n.i,  6oif. 

"Hail  Columbia,"  181 

Hale,  J.  P.,  442 

Hallcck,  General  W.  H.,  556  f.,  569 

Hamilton,  Alexander,  and  the  Consti- 
tution, 135,  137,  143;  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  150,  152 f.,  171  f.;  de- 
fends Jay's  Treaty,  176;  and  French 
war,  i8if.;  and  Whisky  Rebellion, 
i86f.;  and  Adams,  189,  191,  192 n., 
197,  199;  and  Burr,  200,  222 

Hamilton,  Governor,  of  South  Carolina, 

371,373 

Hammond,  Senator,  513,  517  f. 

Hampton,  General  Wade,  267 

Hampton  Roads,  battle  of,  563 f.;  con- 
ference at,  589  f . 

Hancock,  John,  43,  60 n. 

Hancock,  General  W.  S.,  376,  577  f. 

Harlem  Heights,  battle  of,  85 

Harpers  Ferry,  516,  571 

Harrisburg  convention,  of  1827,  343; 
of  1839, 399 

Harrison,  Benjamin,  142 

Harrison,  General  W.  H.,  250,  268,  299, 
393,399,403 

Hartford  Convention,  279^ 

"Hartford  wits,"  13  6 

Harvard  College,  15,378 

Harvey,  John,  14 

Hawkes,  Admiral,  61 

Hay,  George,  230,  264 

Hayne,  Robert  Y.,  340, 345, 355  f .,  3 73 

Helper,  H.R.,  517 

Henry,  Patrick,  57,  sgn.i,  64,  icon., 
108, 14if.,  i63n.i,  3i2n. 

Hessians,  89 

Hicks,  Governor,  of  Maryland,  547 

Hill,  General  A.  P.,  576 

Hill,  General  D.H.,  571 

Hill,  Isaac,  353, 357 

Hillsborough,  Lord,  23 

Hise,  Elijah,  46 1 

Hoar,  G.  F.,  132 

Holy  Alliance,  322 

Homestead  Bill,  515 

Hood,  General  J.  B.,  589 

Hooker,  General  Joseph,  575,  577,  583 


Hooker,  Thomas,  2on. 

Hopkinson,  Joseph,  181 

Houston,  General  Samuel,  412!. 

Howe,  General  George,  86 

Howe,  Lord  Richard,  84 

Howe,  General  William,  83  f .,  88  and  n., 

90  f. 

Hudson,  campaign  for,  90  f. 
Huelsemann,  Chevalier,  459 
Huguenots,  3 
Hull,  Isaac,  264 

Hull,  General  William,  257,  260 f. 
Hungary,  459  f. 
"Hunkers,"  441 
Hunt,  Mrs.  R.L.,  534^ 
Hunter,  General,  594 n. 
Hutchinson,  Thomas,  55,  64,  66,  70,  74 n. 

Ide,  William  B.,  428 

Illinois  admitted,  299 

Immigration,  5,  468  f.,  530 

"Impending  Crisis,  The,"  517 

Impressment,  237 f.,  254^,  277n. 

Income  tax,  605 

Independent  Treasury,  395  f .,  405, 443  n. 

Indiana  admitted,  299 

Industrial' Revolution,  469 

Internal  Improvements,  321   and  n.2, 

337 

Intolerable  Acts,  70,  72, 92 
Iowa  admitted,  443  n. 
Ireland,  60,  79  n.,  469  f. 
Iroquois,  36  n.,  114 
"Irrepressible  Conflict,  The,"  521 
Izard,  General  George,  269 

Jackson,  Andrew,  senator,  189;  and 
Burr,  229;  in  War  of  1812,  269, 
273f.,  287;  and  Indians,  3Oof.;  on 
Texas,  3O4n.;  campaign  of  1824, 
33of.,  335n.;  campaign  of  1828,  345; 
presidency,  348 f.;  character,  35 if., 
365  f.;  and  Calhoun,  354f.;  and 
Bank,  358 f.,  363 f.;  reflected  in  1832, 
365;  and  nullification,  368n.,  36of., 
372;  second  term,  377 f.;  foreign 
affairs,  378f. ;  censured,  384;  op- 
position to,  387 ;  end  of  era,  402 ;  on 
Texas,  413 

Jackson,  General  T.  J.  ("Stonewall"), 

533  *-,  56Qf. ,575 
Jackson,  Michigan,  491 
Jackson,  Mississippi,  579 
"  Jackson's  Yellow  Boys,"  386 
James  I,  if.,  7f.,  22 


INDEX 


XXXlll 


James  II,  nn.i 

Jameson,  J.  F.,  141  n. 

Jay,  John,  7;n.,  99,  119,  126,  129,  143, 
150, 199, 306 

Jay-Gardoqui  treaty,  127  f. 

Jay's  Treaty, of  1794, 175!,  i78f.,  187  f. 

Jefferson,  Thomas,  on  grievances  of 
American  colonies,  58,  66  n.,  70  and 
n.,  72  n.  i,  74,  77  n.,  78;  and  Decla- 
ration of  Independence,  80;  on  Union, 
109;  on  Articles  of  Confederation, 
no;  and  Western  land  claims,  115; 
minister  at  Paris,  12 if.;  on  Con- 
stitution, 135 ;  on  Washington,  149 n., 
Secretary  of  State,  150,  157,  169, 
326;  on  Bank,  159;  opposes  Hamil- 
ton, 165,  i66n.2,  185;  organizes 
Republicans,  i86f.;  vice  president, 
189,  193  ;  and  Kentucky  Resolutions, 
194;  elected  president,  195  f.,  201; 
policy,  204  f.,  209  f.,  212;  on  New 
Orleans,  2i4f.;  on  West  Florida,  220, 
225  f.,  234;  reelected,  222;  and 
Chesapeake  affair,  239 f.;  criticisms 
of,  242 f.;  on  War  of  1812,  260;  on 
manufactures,  286;  and  Marshall, 
308;  on  slavery,  311,  314;  ordinance 
of  1784, 3 12 f.;  on  states' rights,  337 ; 
Jeffersonian  Democracy, 348 f.;  birth- 
day dinner  of  1830,  356  f. 

Jena,  battle  of,  235 

Johnson,  Arthur,  88n.i 

Johnson,  H.  V.,  520 

Johnson,  General  R.  M.,  249,  269, 393 

Johnston,  General  A.  S.,  558 f. 

Johnston,   General   J.  E.,   552  f.,   565, 

579,586,591 

Jones,  John  Paul,  211,  264 
Juarez,  619 

"Judas  of  the  West,"  333 
Judiciary  Act,  of  1789,  151,  207,  306; 

of  1801,201,206 

Kalm,  Peter,  42,  56  and  n. 

Kansas,  492  f .,  498 f.,  504 f.,  507 

Kansas-Nebraska  Bill,  484  f. 

Kaskaskia,  icon. 

Kearny,  General  S.  W.,  426  f. 

Kearsarge,  the,  618 

Kendall,  Amos,  384, 389 

Kenesaw  Mountain,  battle  of,  587 

Kentucky,  admitted,  313;  loyalty  of, 

548,  556 f.;  invaded,  573 
Kentucky  Resolutions,  194 f. 
King,  Rufus,  212,  232,  244,  288f.,  316 


King's  Mountain,  battle  of,  94 
"  Know-Nothings,"  470  f.,  492 
Knox,  Henry,  150, 152 
Kossuth,  Louis,  460 

Labor,  in  thirties,  359f.;  in  Civil  War, 

6l2f.  * 

Lafayette,  Marquis  de,  88,  97, 103 

Lake  Champlain,  battle  of,  271 

Lake  Erie,  battle  of,  268f. 

Lakes,  Great,  481  f . 

Lamar,  president  of  Texas,  414 

Land  sales,  223,293 

Lane,  Joseph,  520 

LaSalle,36 

Latin  America,  338  f. 

Laud,  Archbishop,  n,  17,  73 

Laurens,  Colonel  John,  97 

Lawrence,  Amos,  493 

Lawrence,  Captain,  267 

Lawrence,  Kansas,  495 

Le  Boeuf ,  Fort,  47 

Lecky,  W.E.  H.,  quoted,  58 f.,  63,  79, 83, 

148 

Le  Clerc,  General,  215 
Lecompton,  Judge,  495, 499 
Lecompton  Constitution,  504  f. 
"Lecompton  Junior,"  506 
Lee,  Charles,  89 

Lee,  Richard  H.,  78, 80,  no,  142 
Lee,    General   Robert    E.,   516,   545  f., 

S65f.,  571  f.,  576n.,  578,  590 f.,  6oin. 
Lee,  William,  8 1 
Leisler,  Jacob,  38  n. 
Leonard,  Daniel,  70 n. 
Letcher,  Governor,  of  Virginia,  549 
Lewis  and  Clark  expedition,  221  and  n., 

305 

Lexington,  battle  of,  75 

Liberator,  the,  380 

Liberty  party,  401 

Lincoln,  Abraham,  in  Congress,  440; 
in  convention  of  1856,  498;  debates 
with  Douglas,  508 f.;- Cooper  Union 
speech,  5 i8f.;  nominated  in  1860, 52 1 ; 
on  Compromise,  526;  on  secession, 
536 f.;  first  inaugural,  540 f.;  cabinet, 
541  and  n.;  call  for  volunteers,  544; 
and  McClellan,  567 f.;  opposition  to, 
in  1862,  57of.;  on  Gettysburg,  578; 
on  the  freeing  of  the  Mississippi, 
58on.;  criticism  of,  in  1863,  584  and 
n.  2, 598  f . ;  reelected,  588 ;  at  Hampton 
Roads,  589;  war  powers,  592^-5  °P- 
position  to,  in  war,  598 f.;  on  Re- 


XXXIV 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


construction,  599;  on  the  Treasury, 
608;  on  war  relief,  6i2n.;  assassi- 
nation, 620;  character,  620  f. 

Lincoln,  General  Benjamin,  94 

Lincoln,  Levi,  201  n. 2,  206 

Linn  Bill,  437 

Livermore,  T.  L.,  552    » 

Livingston,  Edward,  219, 360 

Livingston,  R.  R.,  213 

Locke,  John,  73 

Lodge,  H.  C.,  153  and  n. 

Logan,  General  J.  A.,  589 

Longstreet,  General  James,  570,  576 

Lookout  Mountain,  battle  of,  583 

Lopez  expedition,  463 

Louis  XIV,  3, 34, 38, 45 

Louis  XVI,  83,93 

Louisburg,  50 

Louisiana,  ceded  to  France,  213;  pur- 
chased, 2i4f.,  304;  admitted  as  state, 
219,298,309,31311.1 

Louisville,  573 

Lovejoy,  Elijah,  397,  509 

Lowell,  J.  R.,  422,  434,  450,  452,  528, 
53of.,  6isn. 

Lowndes,  William,  249,  287, 330 

Lundy's  Lane,  battle  of,  270 

Lyon,  Captain  Nathaniel,  548  f. 

Lyons,  Lord,  6i6f. 

McClay,  Senator,  151 

McClellan,  General  G.  B.,  549  and  n., 

555  f->  558,  5M-,  567f.,  57of.,  588 
McCulloch     vs.     Maryland,     i6on.i, 

307 

MacDonough,  Thomas,  271 

McDowell,  General  Irving,  553,  565 

McDuffie,  George,  345, 360, 367 f. 

McKay,  Donald,  47  7  n. 

McLane,  Louis,  360, 383 

McLean,  John,  497  f .,  502 

McLean,  Thomas,  197 

McLeod,  Alexander,  409 

McMaster,  J.  B.,  quoted,  105 

Macon  Bill  No.  2,248 f. 

Madison,  James,  107;  on  Mississippi, 
127  ;  work  for  Constitution,  129,  136, 
143;  party  affiliations,  163  n.i;  on 
Virginia  Resolutions,  194;  Secretary 
of  State,  206,  237,  243;  president, 
244f.;  and  War  of  1812,  25if.,  254, 
275f.,  28of.;  reelected,  266;  on  ex- 
pansion, 282  f.,  296;  vetos  Bank  bill, 
297 

Magoffin,  Governor,  of  Kentucky,  548 


Magruder,  General  J.  B.,  564,  567 f. 

Mahan,  Captain  A.  T.,  281, 328 

Maine  admitted,  317 

Mallory  Bill,  343 

Malvern  Hill,  battle  of,  567 

Manassas,  battle  of,  553  f.,  569 

Manufactures,  in  1812,  256f.;  in  1815, 
281,  285;  in  1819,  342  f.,  349;  in 
1850,  471  f.;  in  1860,  529;  in  Civil 
War,  612  f. 

Marbury  vs.  Madison,  207 

Marcy,  W.  M.,  351, 464^ 

Maret,  253 

Marshall,  John,  117, 133,  i43n.,  i6on.  i, 
i8of.,  230, 3o6f. 

Martin,  Luther,  139 

Martin  vs.  Hunter's  Lessee,  306 

Martineau,  Harriet,  381  n. 

Martinique,  61 

Mason,  George,  138 

Mason,  Jeremiah,  359 

Mason,  John  M.,  464, 6i6f . 

Maysville  veto,  358 

Maximilian  of  Austria,  619  f. 

Meade,  General  George,  577 f. 

Mercantile  theory,  27 

Merchant  marine,  478 

Merry,  Anthony,  229 

Metternich,  215,459 

Mexican  War,  42 if.,  434 f. 

Mexico,  322,  412,  4i4n.,  422f.,  514, 
6i9f. 

"  Middle  passage,"  the,  311 

Milan  Decree,  236 

Mill  Spring,  battle  of,  557 

Minden,  battle  of,  50 

Minutemen,  75 

Miranda,  182  n. 

Missionary  Ridge,  battle  of,  583  f . 

Mississippi,  admission,  299 

Mississippi  River,  126!,  556  f.,  580 

Missouri,  slavery  in,  304 n.;  territory, 
309 

Missouri  Compromise,  309  f.,  3i8n.i, 
320,  483  f. 

Mobile,  273 

Mobile  Bay,  battle  of,  587  f. 

Monitor  and  Virginia,  battle  of,  562  f. 

Monmouth,  battle  of,  93 

Monroe,  James,  129 n.i,  137;  envoy  to 
France,  i78f.,  ig6f.,2i5f.;  envoy  to 
England,  238 ;  Secretary  of  State,  245, 
249;  and  Jackson,  274,  302;  elected 
president,  288;  tour,  289;  on  internal 
improvements,  297 ;  on  Texas,  304 n. ; 


INDEX 


XXXV 


on  Missouri  Compromise,  317;  re- 
elected,  321  and  n.  ;  success,  330 

Monroe  Doctrine,  322  f.,  325,  328, 
46of.,  615,  6ign.i. 

Monterey,  California,  42  7  f.,  445 

Monterey,  Mexico,  429      , 

Montgomery,  Alabama,  529,  535 

Montreal,  50  f. 

Morgan,  General  Daniel,  573 

Morgan,  William,  361  n. 

Morris,  Gouverneur,  118,  141,  178 

Morris,  Robert,  n8f.,  153 

Morristown,  85,  89 

Morton,  Governor,  of  Indiana,  575 

Moultrie,  Fort,  84 

Mount  Vernon,  137 

Moustier,  Count,  152 

Murfreesboro,  battle  of,  573 

Murray,  William  Vans,  182  f  . 

Napoleon  I,  see  Bonaparte 

Napoleon  III,  581  and  n.2,  6i4f.,  6i9f. 

Nashville,  454^,  5S8n.2,  574,  588 

Natchez,  127 

National  Republicans,  335,  362 

Native-  Americanism,  387  f.,  470 

Nat  Turner's  Rebellion,  391  n. 

"Natural  rights,"  66  and  n. 

Naturalization  Act,  191 

Navigation  Acts,  25,  28  f.,  32,  38,  43  f., 


Navy,  207,  258,  264f.,  562  f. 

Nebraska,  483  f  . 

Necker,  116 

Nelson,  William,  548 

Neutrality  act  of  1794,  171 

New  England,  nf.,  258  f.,  279,388 

New  France,  45  f. 

New  Granada,  see  Colombia 

New  Mexico,  433,  440,  445 

New  Orleans,  2i3f.,  274f.,  294^,  463, 

481,561 
Newport,  93 
Niagara,  50,  263 
Nicaragua,  461,  474n. 
Nominating  conventions,  360  f. 
Nonintercourse  Act,  of  1794,  i88n.;  of 

1806,  235;  of  1809,  242,  246;  of  1811, 

248;  of  1861,593 

Nootka  Sound  controversy,  169,  212 
North,  Lord,  58,  69,  73,  79,  88n.i,  92, 

98,  109 

Northwest  Ordinance,  131  f.,  313 
Nullification,   in    1798,    195;   in    1832, 

367  f.,  371  f.,  37s'f. 


Ohio,  admission,  222 f. 

Ohio  valley,  contest  for,  47  f. 

Old  Colonial  System,  28,  61 . 

Olmstead,  F.  L.,  480 n.,  539 n.2 

Olney,  Richard,  327 

Onis,  Don  Luis  de,  302  f . 

Orders  in  Council,  235 f.,  240,  251,  256, 

275,277^ 
Oregon,  221,  305 f.,  381  f.,  409^,  436f., 

438 n.  i,  440 f. 
Oreto,  the,  617 
Orient,  trade  with,  131 
Orleans,  territory  of,  218 
Osgood,  H.  L.,  20  n. 
Ostend  Manifesto,  464  f. 
Otis,  James,  43,  59 n.  i,  62  f .,  66,  77n. 
Owen- Glass  Act,  608  n.  i 

Pacific  Railroad,  480,  515 

Paine,  Thomas,  7211.1,81, 120 

Pakenham,Sir  Edward,  274^ 

Palmer,  B.  M.,  539n.  i 

Palmerston,  Lord,  422 

Palo  Alto,  battle  of,  424 

Panama  mission,  338 

Pan-American  policy,  323 

Panic,  of  1837, 394f.;  of  1857,512^ 

Paris,  Treaty  of,  1763,  54,  S6f.;  1783, 

99  f. 

Parkman,  Francis,  34, 49 n. 
Parliament  and  colonies,  22 f.,  33,  39, 

42,  52,  65f. 
Patent  Office,  472  n. 
Patterson,  General  Robert,  552 
Patterson,  Governor,  of  New  Jersey, 

i39 

Peace  convention  of  1861,  530 
Peel,  Robert,  416  f. 
Pemberton,  General  J.  C.,  579 
Peninsular  campaign,  564  f. 
Penn,  Richard,  77 
Penn,  William,  3,22 n.,  2711. 
Pensacola,  273,301 
Perceval,  Spencer,  253,  256 
Perry,  Oliver  H.,  268 f. 
Perry ville,  battle  of,  573 
Personal  Liberty  Acts,  446 
Petersburg,  siege  of,  587,  590 
Petersham,  battle  of,  122 
Philippines,  20 
Pickens,  Governor,  of  South  Carolina, 

543  . 

Pickering,  John,  211 
Pickering,  Timothy,  i8in.,  182  f.,  191, 

241,279,288 


XXXVI 


THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Pickett's  Charge,  577 f. 

Pierce,  Franklin,  458,  464,  466,  494 f., 

498,  502 

Pierpont,  F.  H.,  549 
Pike,  Zebulon,  22 in. 
Pinckney,  Charles,  390 
Pinckney,  C.  C.,  i79f.,  197,  222, 345 
Pinckney,  Thomas,  141  and  n.,  177, 189, 

257 

Pinkney,  William,  238,  241,  249, 315 
Pitt,  Fort,  50 
Pitt,  William,  40,  49,  5 if.,  57*-.  61,  64, 

72,75,79,8in. 
Plantation  system,  473  f . 
"Pocket  veto,"  600 n. 
Poinsett,  Joel  R.,  372 
Polk,  James  K.,  Speaker  of  the  House, 

389;  in  campaign  of  1844, 4i8f.;  and 

Mexico,    423,    42 6 f.;    and    Oregon, 

438 f.;  on  Cuba,  463 
Polk,  General  Leonidas,  556 f. 
Polly  case,  233  n. 
Pondicherry,  51 
Pontiac,  59  f. 
"Pony  express,"  530 
Pope,  General  John,  561,  569f.,  S7on. 
"Popular  sovereignty,"  445 f.,  505 
Population,  in   1790,  104  n.i,  313^2; 

in  1850,  468;  in  1860,  529,  550 
Porter,  Admiral,  579 
Porter,  General  Fitz-John,  566 
Porter,  Peter  B.,  249,  251,  263,  269,  296 
Port  Hudson,  561,  580  and  n. 
Port  Royal,  34  n. 
Pottawatomie,  496  f. 
Prevost,  Sir  George,  259,  27of. 
Price,  General  Sterling,  549 
Princeton,  battle  of,  89 
Privateers,  278n. 
Proclamation  Line,  60, 113 
Procter,  General,  267,  269 
Public  lands,  2i8n.,  295, 391 
Pulaski,  Count,  88 
Puritans,  n,  15 f. 
Putnam,  General  Israel,  84 
Pym,  John,  23 

Quadruple  Alliance,  322  f. 

Quakers,  17 

Quartering  Act,  68  n.,  70 

Quebec,  34  and  n.,  45 f.,  50,  56,  59,  72, 

86,  113 

Queenstown  Heights,  battle  of,  263 
Quiberon,  battle  of,  51 
"Quids,"  227 


Quincy,  Josiah,  283,  298 

Quitman,  Governor,  of  Mississippi,  457, 

463 
Quitrents,  26  n.,  42 

Railroads,  380  f.,  478f.,  512,  582  and  n. 

Raleigh  letter,  418 f. 

Rambouillet  Decree,  23 in.,  236,  248 

Randolph,  Edmund,  138, 150, 159 

Randolph,  Edward,  30  and  n. 

Randolph,  John,  207,  224,  243,  248n., 
249,  283,  287,  317,  333,  344n.,  346n. 

Ray,  P.O.,  488  n. 

Red  Cross,  61 1  and  n.  2 

Redemptioners,  9n.i 

"Red  Sticks,"  2 73 

Reeder,A.H.,493f. 

Reid,  Whitelaw,  55 

Religion  in  colonies,  i6f. 

Removal  of  deposits,  383  f. 

Renaissance,  5 

Republicans,  of  1791,  i63n.2;  of  1815, 
282 ;  of  1854,  49of.,  498,  537 

Resaca  de  la  Palma,  battle  of,  424 

Restoration  of  1660,  23 

Revolution,  American,  55 f. 

Revolution,  English,  40 

Revolution,  French,  see  French  Revolu- 
tion 

Reynolds,  General  J.  F.,  577 

Rhea  letter,  300  and  n.  i 

Rhett,R.B.,4S7,S24n. 

Rhode  Island,  13,  38f.,  6in.2,  65,  119, 
122,  i48n.,  349  and  n.2 

Rhodes,  J.  F.,  quoted,  453".,  460,  487, 
489,  sosn.,  S27n.3,  538,  581,  6i4n. 

Richmond,  550, 553,  564^,  s86f.,  591 

Rives,  W.C.,  379 

Robertson,  James,  104, 113 

Robinson,  Charles,  494  f. 

Rochambeau,  General,  96  f. 

Rochefoucauld,  Duke  of,  16 

Rockingham,  Marquis  of,  65, 98 

Rodgers,  Commodore,  250 

Rodney,  Admiral,  100 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  150 

Rose,  George,  241 

Rosecrans,  General  W.  S.,  573,  582!. 

Ross,  Betsy,  309  n. 

Ross,  General,  272 

Rousseau,  L.  H.,  548 

Rule  of  1756, 173,  233n.,  245 

Rush,  Richard,  3 24 

Rusk  BUI,  480 

Russell,  John,  254 


INDEX 


xxxvii 


Russell,  Lord  John,  616,  618 
Russell,  Jonathan,  275!. 
Russell,  W.  H.,  532 
Russia,  treaty  with,  323, 327 n. 
Rutledge,  Edward,  inf.,  306 
Rutledge,  John,  86  n.,  151 

St.  Augustine,  300  and  n.  2 

St.  Clair,  General  Arthur,  167, 174 

St.  Leger, .General,  90  f. 

Sandford,  John,  501 

Sanitary  Commission,  6n 

San  Jacinto,  battle  of,  412 

San  Pascual,  battle  of,  427, 429 

Santa  Anna,  General,  412, 423, 43of. 

Santa  Fe,  426 

Santo  Domingo,  215 

Saratoga,  battle  of,  91 

Savannah, 94, 589 

Savannah,  the,  329 

Schenectady,  46 

Schuyler,  General  Peter,  91 

Schwab,  J.  C.,  6ion.2 

Scotch-Irish,  2 

Scott,  Dred,  501  f. 

Scott,  Sir  William,  233  n. 

Scott,  General  Winfield,  269!,  397,429  f  •, 
432 f.,  458,  525,  52811.1,  532,  S4on.2, 
542,  547,  552  f. 

Secession,  523 f.,  527,  534f. 

Sedition  Act,  192  f. 

Seminole  War,  300  f. 

Semmes,  Captain  Raphael,  618 

Sequestration  Act,  554 

Seven th-of -March  speech,  450  f. 

Sewall,  Samuel,  17 

Seward,  W.  H.,  governor  of  New  York, 
395;  on  Texas,  436;  and  Tyler,  445; 
on  Compromise  of  1850,  453 ;  on 
Kansas,  492;  in  campaign  of  1856,, 
497;  in  campaign  of  1860,  52of.; 
offers  compromise,  538 ;  Secretary  of 
State,  541  and  n.2,  542 f.;  on  war, 
551  n.  2;  at  Hampton  Roads,  589;  on 
Trent  affair,  617;  warns  Napoleon 
III,  619 

Seymour,  Governor  Horatio,  577 

Shannon,  Wilson,  494  f. 

Sharpsburg,  see  Antietam 

Shays's  Rebellion,  122, 129, 136 

Shelburne,  Lord,  99 

Shenandoah,  the,  618 

Shenandoah  campaign,  565  f. 

Sheridan,  General  Philip  H.,  583  f .,  588, 
620 


Sherman,  John,  517 

Sherman,  General  W.  T.,  579!.,  586, 
588  and  n.2,  59of. 

Shields,  General,  566 

Shiloh,  battle  of,  560 f. 

Shipbuilding,  476,  562  and  n. 

Slade  of  Vermont,  388  f. 

Slave  trade,  abolished  in  1808,  244;  in 
colonies,  311;  on  African  coast,  409; 
in  the  fifties,  448,  473,  514 f.;  abol- 
ished in  District  of  Columbia,  454 

Slavery,  introduction  of,  310;  and 
nullification,  376;  in  New  Mexico, 
440 f.,  446 f.;  status  in  1850,  456; 
trend  to  lower  South,  473  and  n.i 
and  n.2;  in  Lincoln-Douglas  debates, 
5iof.;  and  business,  53 if.;  discus- 
sion of,  539;  during  Civil  War,  594  f. 

Slidell,  John,  423 f.,  514,  581  n.  2, 615 f. 

Sloat,  Commodore,  427 

Smith,  Caleb,  541  n.2. 

Smith,  Goldwin,  546n. 

Smith,  Justin  H.,  423, 435 n. 

Smith,  General  Kirby,  573,  591 

Smith,  Robert,  206,  244 f.,  249 

Smith,  Samuel,  206 

Smith,  General  W.  F.,  583 

Smythe,  General  Alexander,  263 

Soule,  Pierre,  464  f . 

"  Southern  Rights  "  associations,  457 

Spain,  explorers,  6f . ;  in  Revolution,  96 ; 
disputes  with,  in  West,  i24f.,  i68f.; 
Treaty  of  San  Lorenzo  (1795),  177; 
sells  Florida,  303 ;  relations  with,  in 
1850-1854,  462  f. 

Sparks,  Jared,  41 1  n. 

Specie  Circular,  392  f . 

Spoils  system,  353 

Spottsylvania,  battle  of,  587 

"  Squatter  sovereignty,"  445  f .,  486 

Stamp  Act,  62  f .,  67,  79 

Stanton,  Edwin  M.,  527 n.i,  541  n.2, 
556,  582!.,  SQin.,  620 

Star  of  the  West,  the,  529 

Stars  and  Bars,  546 

Star-Spangled  Banner,  272 

Stockton,  Commodore  R.  F.,  428 

Stoddard,  Benjamin,  181 

Story,  Justice,  13  n.2 

Stephens,  Alexander  H.,  77,  423,  485, 
514,  527,  535,  589,  601 

Stephenson,  George,  381 

Steuben,  Baron,  88, 129 

Stuarts,  1,9 

Subtreasury,  395 


xxxviii         THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Suff oik  Resolves,  71  f. 

Sugar  Act,  of  1764,  62  f. 

Sugar  and  Molasses  Act,  of  1733, 44,  61 

Sullivan,  General  John,  86 n. 

Sumner,  Charles,  495  f .,  615  n.,  617 

Sumner,  General  E.  V.,  565  f. 

Sumter,  Fort,  541  f. 

Supreme  Court,  501  f .,  503 

Swedes,  3 

Talleyrand,  i8of.,  2i6n. 

Tallmadge,  James,  310, 315, 317 

Tammany  Hall,  470 

Taney,  Roger  B.,  383 f.,  502 

Tariff,  of  1789,  i49f.;  of  1816,  286f.; 
of  1824,  331  f.,  342 f.;  of  1828,  344f., 
367;  of  1832,  371;  of  1833,  374n.2; 
reform,  of,  377;  of  1842,  407;  of 
1846,  471  n. 2,  477;  in  Civil  War,  604 

Taylor,  John,  193, 195 

Taylor,  General  Richard,  581,  59 1 

Taylor,  Zachary,424f.,429f.,44if., 445, 

454 

Tea,  tax  on,  68 f.,  92 

Tecumseh,  177,  250,  269 

Tennessee,  313,  549,  584 n.i 

"Terrapin  policy,"  240 n. 

Texas,  "surrender"  of,  304  and  n.;  ex- 
pansion toward,  381 ;  annexation  of, 
397 f.,  412 f.,  42of.;  British  influence 
in,  4i4f.;  in  Compromise  of  1850, 
448;  convention  in  1861,  527 

Thames,  battle  of,  269 

Thanksgiving  Day,  581  n.3,  584 

Thayer,  Eli,  493 

Thomas,  General  G.  H.,  317,  557,  582!, 
588f. 

Thornton,  Captain,  424 

Tilghman,  General,  557 

Tippecanoe,  battle  of,  250 

Tocqueville,  Alexis  de,  365 

Tompkins,  Governor,  of  New  York,  241 

Toombs,  Robert,  423,  447,  498,  500, 
54on.,543 

Topeka  Constitution,  494, 498 

Tories,  79,  8if.,  86,  88,  92,  100,  102, 

"3*: 

Toussaint  L'Ouverture,  215 

Townshend,  Charles,  67  and  n.,  68 

Trafalgar,  battle  of,  234 

Treaty,  of  Paris  (1763),  54,  56 f.;  of 
Paris  (1783),  99*.,  123;  Jay,  175*-, 
i78f.,  187 f.;  of  Grenville,  177;  of 
San  Lorenzo,  177;  of  1800  with 
Napoleon,  184;  of  San  Ildefonso, 


213;  of  1806  with  England,  238;  of 
Ghent,  277  f.;  of  Fort  Wayne,  299; 
of  1819  with  Spain,  303  f.;  of  1818 
with  Great  Britain,  305  f.;  of  Indian 
Springs,  341;  of  1827  with  Great 
Britain,  409  ;  Webster-  Ashburton, 
4iof.;  of  1844  with  Texas,  41  7  f.; 
of  Guadalupe-Hidalgo,  433  ;  of  1846 
with  Great  Britain,  438 

Trenholm,  Secretary,  603  f  . 

Trent  affair,  556,616  f. 

Trenton,  battle  of,  89 

Trescot,  W.  H.,  524 

Trianon  Decree,  248 

Triple  Alliance,  25 

Tripoli,  210  f. 

Trist,  Nicholas,  432  f. 

Troup,  Governor,  of  Georgia,  341  f. 

Tucker,  Dean  Josiah,  78,  116 

Turner,  Nat,  380 

Tuyl,  Baron,  324 

Tyler,  John,  375  n.,  400,  404  f.,  406  f., 


Tyler,  L.  G.,  408 

"Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,"  517 
"Underground  railroad,"  446,  457 
Unionists,  Southern,  490  n. 
Upshur,  A.,  Secretary  of  State,  4i5f. 

Vallandigham,  C.  L.,  575,  588 

Valley  Forge,  88 

Valmy,  battle  of,  169 

Van    Buren,    Martin,    senator,    335; 

Secretary  of  State,  354;  vice  presi- 

dent, 362,  385  ;  nominated  to  English 

mission,   378;    president,   382,   393; 

criticism  of,  400;  and  Texas,  413  f.; 

in   campaign   of    1844,  418;    nomi- 

nated in  1848,  441  f. 
Vance,  Governor,  of  North  Carolina, 

602 

Van  Dorn,  General,  571,  574  n. 
Van  Rensselaer,  General  Stephen,  263 
Van  Tyne,  C.  H.,  quoted,  92  n.,  io8n. 
Vaudreuil,  Marquis  de,  51 
Venango,  Fort,  47 
Venezuela,  327 
Vera  Cruz,  432 

Vergennes,  Comte  de,  56,92,99,102,125 
VerplanckBill,374f. 

Vicksburg,5i4,56i,579f.>595 
Victor,  General,  220 
Vincennes,  ioon.1,  127 
Virginia,  the,  563  f. 


INDEX 


XXXIX 


Virginia  Company,  7!.,  31;  settlement, 

nn.i,  15,39 
Virginia  Resolutions,  194  f. 

Wade,  Benjamin,  599 

Walcott,  Governor,  of  Connecticut,  294 

Walker,  L.  P.,  541  n.  i 

Walker,  Robert  J.,  504!. 

Walker,  William,  474  f.,  514 

Walker  tariff,  47 1  n.  2, 477 

Wallace,  General  Lew,  560 

Walpole,  Horace,  51 

Walpole,  Robert,  57  and  n. 

"War  hawks,"  249 

Washington,  city  of,  204,  27 if.,  546 f., 
554  and  n.  i,  587 

Washington,  George,  in  French  and 
Indian  War,  2 in.,  47,  48  and  n.;  in 
Revolution,  75 f.,  77  and  n.,  82  f., 
84f.,  89f.,  93,  96,  97,  102 f.,  106;  on 
government  after  1783,  117,  i29n.i, 
130;  president,  123,  i47f.,  152,  159; 
on  West,  127,  i29n.2, 135 ;  and  Con- 
stitution, 137,  142,  144;  character, 
148 f.;  reelection,  167;  and  European 
war,  170,  175;  and  Jay  Treaty,  176; 
and  French  war,  181 ;  a  Federalist, 
187;  retirement,  188;  death,  197 

Washington,  Colonel  Lewis,  516 

Wayne, "  Mad  Anthony,"  177 

Webb,  J.Watson,  387  n. 

Webster,  Daniel,  on  Northwest  Ordi- 
nance, 132;  on  Hamilton,  160;  in 
Dartmouth  College  case,  307 ;  on 
Monroe  Doctrine,  327;  debate  with 
Hayne,  356;  on  Jackson,  374n.;  in 
campaign  of  1836,  393;  Secretary  of 
State,  403,  409;  on  Bank,  406;  on 
Mexican  War,  434!. ;  on  Compromise 
of  1850,  450 f.;  in  campaign  of  1852, 
458;  Huelsemann  letter,  459 f.;  on 
New  Orleans  riot,  464 

Webster,  Peletiah,  1 18 

Weed,  Thurlow,  520,  537  and  n. 

Welles,  Gideon,  541  and  n.  2, 616 

Wellesley,  marquis  of,  248  f.,  253 

Western  migration,  2i3f.,  222!.,  29of., 
293  f -,336, 349 f.,  355  *• 


West  Florida,  zigi .,  225f .,  255  n.  2, 304 
West  Indies,  44,  61,  92  n.,  173  and  n., 

233, 378  f. 
West  Virginia,  550 
Wheeler,  General  Joseph,  573 
Whigs,  American,  382  f.,  387  f.,  434 f., 

459,  489 
Whigs,  English,  39  f.,  74 f.,  8in.,  97  f., 

IO2 

Whisky  Rebellion,  166, 174,  i86f. 

White,  Hugh  L.,  393 

White  Plains,  85, 97 

Whitman,  Marcus,  436  and  n.2 

Whitney,  Asa,  480 

Whitney,  Eli,  176^,314 

Whittier,  J.  G.,  416, 452,  501,  532 n.2 

Wilderness,  battle  of,  587 

Wilkes,  Captain,  616 

Wilkins  Bill,  374f. 

Wilkinson,  General  James,  229 f.,  257!., 

267 

William  III  (of  Orange) ,  22tn.,  26, 38,46 
William  and  Mary  College,  16 
Williams,  Roger,  17 
Wilmot,  David,  439 f. 
Wilmot  Proviso,  439 f.,  443  f.,  508 
Wilson,  James,  139, 151 
Winder,  General,  272 
Winthrop,  John,  8, 12, 17,  20  and  n. 
Winthrop,  R.  C.,  447,  531 
Wirt,  William,  361 
Wise,  Governor  Henry  A.,  476 
Wolfe,  General  James,  50,  54,  56,  60,  86 
Women,  in  Civil  War,  612 n.i,  6i3n.i 
Wood,  Fernando,  513  n.,  531  f .,  545 
Woodbury,  Levi,  359 
Wool,  General,  426 f. 
Wright,  Silas,  443  n. 

XYZ  Affair,  i8of. 

Yancey,W.L.,457,5i9 
Yazoo  frauds,  227!. 
York,  Duke  of,  25 

Yorktown,  in  Revolution,  93,  98;  in 
Civil  War,  564 f. 

Zollicoffer,  General,  557 


